Watertrust Australia Website

Watertrust Australia is a not-for-profit organisation aiming to improve the decision-making process and policies for managing Australia’s water and catchments. As the organisation progresses in their mission to improve water policy, their website needs to adjust to their evolving research, services and new audiences.

The brief

Watertrust Australia engaged Think HQ to help build a robust ecosystem on a Drupal CMS with the view of gaining flexibility of content management and world-class user experience as their audience grew and their service evolved. The website content and design should ensure users understand the Watertrust Australia role and add value: an independent organisation building water catchment policy with a transparent and trustworthy approach. 

ThinkHQ was contracted to engineer the best solution at the intersection of technology flexibility, content clarity and value-based design.

The Challenge

From Watertrust Australia's perspective:

Watertrust Australia uses their web ecosystem as their way to build trust, recognition and transparency with a diverse group of actors involved in water policy in Australia.

With their work rapidly evolving, they needed a website that could ensure full flexibility to construct pages on the fly and adjust to new content requirements, so their content managers could rapidly respond to fast-evolving challenges. With an eye on the long-term purpose, Watertrust Australia saw the need to integrate data-rich white paper and publication that would ensure Water Policy decisions are well understood by key actors. Building a future-proof ecosystem on a flexible CMS was central to their fulfilling their mission.

From a user perspective, the diverse actors involved in water policy often looked for the same information: understanding more about the people behind Watertrust Australia and their approach to policy making so they could build trust in the organisation and further engage with their mission.

From the technology side:

Our main technology challenge was to build a flexible content management system that could adjust to future content needs, giving content managers a palette of tools to adjust to new communication challenges. In addition, as Watertrust Australia engages with government and other NFPs such as water foundations, the solution had to be secured, easy to maintain and fully compliant with diverse users and devices. 

The solution

Overview

The ThinkHQ team lead the project through discovery, design and development stages, keeping in mind Watertrust Australia's vision throughout the process. The ecosystem was built on Drupal 9 CMS within the Pantheon platform meeting foundational security and performance rigour. The engineering prowess comes from the complete flexibility of content management using the Drupal Layout Builder and the Bootstrap library. Through a modern design, the content and brand experience offers users easy navigation and content discovery to find the required information across any device.

A dynamic and future-proofed CMS architecture

Our team created a range of custom component blocks giving Watertrust Australia content managers the flexibility of constructing new pages using the Drupal Layout Builder.

Using the Bootstrap library, the website custom components could be altered across the required column grid providing additional layout options when it comes to communicating new content. While the Watertrust Australia website is only made of 18 custom component blocks, content managers benefit from much greater flexibility and the ability to adapt to future content requirements.

A fresh design and a fully accessible front-end

The new website design is the perfect example of the Watertrust Australia visual identity, which was created 
to embody a sense of strength, responsibility and trust. There is an emphasis on large, beautiful colour imagery of Australian waterways, highlighting the purpose of Watertrust Australia’s mission — to facilitate better decision-making about the management of Australia’s most precious and often elusive resource: water. 

High-contrast dark backgrounds with simple white text create a highly-legible reading experience, with large headings and pull quotes so that visitors can easily scan content.

The outcome

ThinkHQ delivered a site that showcases Watertrust Australia's identity, is user-friendly, accessible and establishes a clear web presence that identifies who they are and what they do. The engineering flexibility will ensure Watertrust Australia is best equipped to improve water policy-making in Australia.