The Flemish Agency for Real Estate Heritage is responsible for the inventory and protection of buildings, landscapes, archaeological sites and sailing heritage. In addition, it supports citizens, local authorities, designers, developers and other bodies with advice and grants. They also propagate the quality of the handling of real estate heritage, with policy-oriented research and good communication about it. They also wanted to translate this quality & targeted communication into a new, user-friendly website.
Digital heritage website for the Flemish government
The website for Flemish real estate heritage was in need of an update. Not only in terms of look 'n feel, but also the back end needed a modern approach. The objective for the new platform was to inform and inspire the various target groups. User-friendliness of the website was also critical, both for the website administrators and the various stakeholders.
Drupal for web accessibility
Technology: Drupal 8 and mailchimp
A Drupal 8 website was chosen, on the one hand to have the most recent updates in terms of development, but also because attention was paid to accessibility of the website, a European directive for government websites.
The website is also integrated with the Marketing Automation platform Mailchimp. The developers ensured that visitors to the website can subscribe to the newsletter in accordance with the imposed GDPR regulations. After a double opt-in, one is automatically added to the correct mailing list.
The big advantage of Drupal as a Content Management system is its flexibility, we can really tailor the back-end to the customer's needs.
For example, attention was paid to a custom workflow when publishing content. Employees of the agency can create content, which can be approved by another employee with an editorial role.
On the other hand, it was also important for the client to have a comprehensive content application capability. This allows employees to create content flexibly.
Finally, news items and blogs from the old website were flawlessly converted to the new website by using migration for Drupal. For this purpose, our back-end developer wrote a custom import module, in order to make the old content fit nicely into the 'new straitjacket'.
To conclude, we had to make the images look perfect for all possible screens, all types of devices and for the different formats. This was solved by using custom responsive image styles, allowing the images to scale with the screen. This makes the images look perfect on any screen, even in full HD. Would you like to learn more about responsive web design?
Thanks to this smooth collaboration with Real Estate Heritage, we were able to bring this project to a successful conclusion!
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