From static to Drupal : adding value the to FDI World Dental Federation

The FDI is the leading organisation for dental health, federating dental associations worldwide. As such, their website is the main channel of communication between the federation and its members. It receives a lot of visitors and content needs to be updated frequently.

They used to have a static website, with only one person updating the content of more than 500 pages, using HTML markup. Part of the process of improving communication with their members, they selected Linalis to migrate their website to a more powerful, flexible and extendable system.

The project required a complete Business Needs and conceptual design, software selection and graphical design. Drupal was the selected CMS based upon their current and future requirements.

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Challenge: 
  • Allow more people (without HTML knowledge) to edit the content, with a hierarchy of roles and an advanced workflow setup
  • Refresh the graphic appearence of the website
  • Keep all the old content
  • Clean up the site structure
  • Allow for future extensions (connecting with contact management, event management and financial systems)
  • The site has to be responsive and quick enought to load in countries with low bandwith internet access
Role of Linalis: 
  • Choosing a CMS
  • Installating and configuring Drupal
  • Choosing, installating and configuring the best Drupal modules for the task
  • Developing custom Drupal modules
  • Enabling multilanguage capabilities
  • Setting up users roles, hierarchy and corresponding access permissions
  • Large migration of content and documents from a static website
  • Creating a new design, implementing complex templates
  • Setting up a moderation worflow for both new and updated content, with the ability to revert to a former revision
  • Implementing SEO improvements
  • Performance tweaking with APC, Boost and Memcache
  • Hosting both versions of the website
Project's Benefits: 

As a result of the migration, the FDI now possesses a better tool to communicate with its members. They can spend less time editing content and more people can do the job, hence allowing them to focus on other tasks. Moreover, the CMS can be further extended to integrate with their internal systems.

Visitors are benefiting from a more accessible website, providing a better navigation experience and more advanced features (RSS feeds, protected pages, dynamic forms...), while search engines are provided meaningful and semantic information to help the website to be indexed comprehensively and ranked higher in their results.

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