Make Do were invited to totally re-design and develop The Oxford University funded FreeSpeechDebate project after a lengthy discovery and introduction process which allowed our team to map out a technical and design solution that would benefit the new project.
The site would be a multi-language website with 13 different languages and hundreds of contributors around the globe.
Key goals to the project where:
- Update the homepage to the new ‘grid’ layout to help showcase the ‘10 principles’
- Give each Free Speech Principle its own specific ‘landing page’
- Improve the design of the ‘article view’ by removing sidebar and improving typography and layout
- Update navigation to be more effective and mobile-friendly
- An overall update of the website design using mobile-first methods
The new site has over 1000 articles in 13 different languages and has almost 20,000 registered users who connect and comment on the websites topics.
Easy to Manage Multiple Languages
Oxford University approached us for this project due to our skills with multi-language sites. This was an extremely complex multi-language site as it had 13 different languages ranging from Spanish to Arabic.
It features right to left languages, standard and latin. These all needed to maintained and managed in a way that was flexible for the client to publish the content they needed to.
The Oxford University team were adamant that English content should also be a fall back if no content exists in other regions. For example if there wasn’t much content available on the Russian version of the site then some English content would display to allow the user to still experience the site.
