Project WET

Founded in 1984, Project WET is an award-winning nonprofit organization with a mission to reach children, parents, teachers and community members of the world with water education. They bring valuable training and educational materials to millions of people in over thirty countries and all U.S. states. Launched to coincide with World Water Day, Mightybytes expanded the organization’s reach with a content-managed site that helps the organization better reach a global audience.

OUR APPROACH

The Project WET team provided us with initial architectural diagrams of how they envisioned organization of site content. We worked with them to streamline the vast array of content and educational materials into an easy-to-use interactive tool where critical water education information is easy to find and important organization goals—such as how to donate, buy materials, get the latest news, and so on—are given equal weight in the navigation and site structure.

IMPLEMENTATION

Design and development were driven by content structures devised during the information architecture phase. Site templates were created to support different content types and integrated with the Expression Engine content management system. The site is web standards-compliant, so all content entries can easily be crawled and understood by search engines.

Site features include:

• Flexible structure to support large amounts of education information.
• Support for different media types, such as audio, photos, and video.
• An online store for purchasing education products.
• A blog and multiple RSS feeds for easy content sharing.
• Integration with social media tools.
• Interactive maps showing Project WET locations around the world.
• Search functions.

THE RETURN

The site has dramatically increased the organization’s ability to disseminate critical educational information to a global audience and in 2009 was given an American Graphic Design Award from Graphic Design USA magazine.