EIT Climate-KIC

THE CHALLENGE

Nicholas was approached by EIT Climate-KIC’s Communications Director Stefan Denig with a major challenge: transform and completely re-design their website, from top to bottom.

EIT Climate-KIC is the European Union’s climate innovation agency and its website had become old and unwieldy. A web agency had tried to start the re-design project one year before and hadn’t been successful, and EIT Climate-KIC was left to pick up the pieces and launch the process all over again.

“The organisation had grown and expanded and the website was no longer relevant” said Denig. We needed to simplify the user journey and re-assess EIT Climate-KIC’s goals for the website, while ensuring that all other websites were interconnected for a unified user experience.

THE SOLUTION

After undertaking a quantitative analysis of the website’s traffic and Google Analytics, Nicholas conducted stakeholder interviews with staff and partners of EIT Climate-KIC. The message was clear: we needed to create a website that was simple and easy to navigate. 

Nicholas analyzed the existing website architecture, re-designed the sitemap completely, and aligned its content with the new strategy. It was like re-arranging a puzzle. 

This was the first step to building the new website structure, helping to map out new objectives and re-arrange EIT Climate-KIC’s content sitemap. Nicholas then put together a wireframe design taking into account new website trends as well as the expectations by Millennials who want to find information quickly and are always mobile.

Subsequently, Nicholas worked closely with the London-based web agency The Web Kitchen in order to build the website, approve new designs and create the content needed to launch the new website. He also produced a new website video for the homepage in collaboration with Brussels-based photographer Tim Buelens.

THE RESULTS

The new multi-dimensional website is beautiful, well-structured and easy to navigate, allowing it to inspire and inform diverse and widespread audiences. The homepage helps capture the imagination of our visitors, encouraging them to take action on climate change and get involved in Climate-KIC’s innovative programs across Europe. 

“The project was particularly challenging because it had to represent a clear and coherent structure for a complex and highly distributed organisation, dealing with complex content and a host of needs” said Gina Lovett, Acting Communications Director, following the launch.

The website design became a model for EIT Climate-KIC, helping to shape all other regional and programme websites of the organisation. All new websites were interconnected thanks to the WordPress multi-site platform, allowing content to seamlessly link from one website to the other.

For more information visit climate-kic.org.