We are proud to announce the recent launch of the new National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) website in October.
Based in the UK, the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) is a research organisation that uses satellite data to monitor and understand the Earth’s natural environments and systems. Their research plays a vital role in helping us to understand environmental events such as climate change, atmospheric composition and ocean behaviour.
Over the past year, we have worked with NCEO to design and develop their new website. Our journey included all the phases of a website redevelopment project, starting with research to understand the different audience types, their journeys and interactions with key content areas to create an optimised structure that would benefit each user. We identified that NCEO staff and academic stakeholders such as university researchers and PhD students would be some of the main audiences interacting with the website as they research information for their NCEO-funded projects.
Part of the project delivery included conducting a site audit and an information analysis of their old site, which forms a base of their new content, to understand the areas where we would make improvements to enhance the site’s usability and performance.
The NCEO client team wanted, as part of the requirement, to base the site off of an existing WCAG2.2AA-accessible WP theme but enhanced with customisations and additional modules to give it a unique bespoke look that couldn’t be achieved through the default theme. Furthermore we developed additional API modules to link to their ORCID database so that publications and staff data are synced to cut down on administrative tasks time as well as reduce errors in content maintenance and retained the same approach to the theme’s backend UI/UX.
Our overall design includes:
- Improved navigation, labelling and page layout
- Modular design approach (content page builder and reusable Gutenberg blocks)
- Visual hero banners at the top of each page
- Decorative patterned background images inspired by the patterns in the logo
- Curved edges across images and other decorative elements
Once the build was complete, we conducted thorough Q&A testing, migrated the key content and set up block patterns (templates) before providing a detailed handover process with supportive documentation to NCEO team to complete the remaining migration.
We are already working with the NCEO team on additional improvements and enhancements to the site. We look forward to continuing to support NCEO as its new digital presence grows.