Our Work
Delivering your vision
IWM Responsive
IWM Responsive A modern, responsive site for all devices
Services
To provide for, and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and 'wartime experience' - the concise but far-reaching aim of the Imperial War Museums. Their role in educating the public about war is enormous, and of extremely high value, so when we were approached to help them build a new responsive website, it was very exciting. We supported and advised on changes to menu structure and information architecture, as well as user experience.
The Challenge
IWM asked us to provide a modern delivery for their site: to represent their information beautifully across all platforms, working with modern browsers and retina devices, and providing graceful degradation for older browsers. They came to us with an incredibly content rich Drupal site. Thousands of articles, a huge archive of documents, photographs, films, art and military equipment, information about their five branches and their large list of events. They also had a very strong web team of designers, developer, content creators and managers.
IWM required knowledge of modern frontend development, and had never implemented a fully Agile workflow on such a large project before.
The challenges we faced were the type that naturally develop with such a large site over time - lots of types of content and templates and a frontend codebase that was difficult to manage. They had a great new design, but had reached the end of their old theme's abilities.
The Solution
Our goal at Cameron & Wilding is to be as collaborative with our clients as possible, so we were able to dive right into the project, working closely between our offices using a shared online task board, setting up daily Google hangouts and quickly becoming one team, with our project manager advising and demonstrating C&W's working practices.
We started work on the new Drupal theme to create something that not only fulfilled their needs but was also extremely easy to understand and manage using the best frontend tools available.
The IWM had multiple menus in different positions on the page, their branches had menu items that were worded differently from one another, and some cleanup was required. We were able to give advice on structural changes as well as visual ones, taking into account the user experience of new visitors to the site, as well as experienced visitors looking to drill down into the IWM archive.
To learn more about the technical details on how we made this happen, read our frontend developer's blog post: "Creating a new modern website".
In the latter stages of the project, the C&W testing team became involved, creating a suite of Behat automated tests to verify the functionality and stability of the website. These tests included content creation and validation, page asset checks to verify that every asset loaded successfully, and visual regression tests to catch any styling issues.
URL: http://www.iwm.org.uk/
IWM
Jeremy Ottevanger, Technical Web Manager
"The quality of the work they produced was outstanding, and the project was run with great humour and with the spirit of one big team. I would not hesitate to recommend the Cameron & Wilding team, who have been a real joy to work with."
The Key Benefits
We built a responsive, significantly more user-friendly theme that could support a mobile-first responsive design, flexibly changing its layout from small mobile devices to tablets and up to desktops.
The project was delivered before the expected date as it maintained a well-managed, fast pace throughout fulfilling all the requirements set.
- A highly responsive, more future-proof site that works well across all manner of devices
- Clearer and more pleasant experience for users
- Extremely easy site to understand and manage using the best frontend tools available
- Very collaborative project team between client and C&W that delivered above expectations
