Flanders Investment & Trade promotes international entrepreneurship in Flanders in a sustainable way, as a key element in the socio-economic development of our region. FIT does this by supporting Flemish companies in their international activities and attracting foreign investors to Flanders.
Companies can call on the networks of contacts at home and abroad. And they provide financial support and information about various financial incentives.
FIT does this from its head office in Brussels, 5 provincial offices, more than 90 offices worldwide and, of course, online! However, there was still a lot of room for improvement there.
The old website clearly suffered from obesity and lack of focus. Almost all the information was on the homepage in one form or another. However, most of the information was only accessible after creating a username and password. Because this information is actually public, a radical choice was made to make as much information as possible immediately accessible.
Calibrate took the initiative to design a new website that creates space and also gives much more editorial freedom to the FIT editors.
The information provided by FIT is crucial for many entrepreneurs. It is therefore very important that this information can be found easily. That is why FIT called on Calibrate to convert their prototypes (wireframes) into a well-functioning website. We made a sober design, fully in line with the new Flemish house style.
The top tasks survey showed that the country dossiers are very important. The data on these pages comes from various sources: the World Bank, Delcredere Ducroire and internal FIT databases. All this information is seamlessly integrated into one country file.
Much of the information on the FIT website is provided by the Flemish economic representatives themselves. They are aware of the situation in the regions for which they are responsible and are therefore best placed to do so.
Among other things, in order to smooth out the effect of different writing styles, we implemented a simple workflow with an approval mechanism. Calibrate is known for its expertise in Drupal and always works with a very user-friendly backend. To this end, we have company-specific know-how on board and we also disseminate these best-practices to the broad Drupal community.
Calibrate invests in making the back-end user-friendly. Making it enjoyable for editors to add content.
Flanders Investment & Trade collects all kinds of actions and events on its website that are relevant to their target group. Calibrate provides an intuitive and fast search function based on the open source technology Solr.
The general search function not only shows web pages in the search results, all attachments (PDF, Word, Excel,... ) are also included in the search results. This ensures that, among other things, the market studies are much more easily accessible. At any time, the filters indicate how many results you can expect after activating an extra search filter. No more "No results found for your criteria"-frustration!
