Plan

We delivered a cleanly designed international website coded to a high standard on Plone, an Enterprise, open-source CMS.

One of the oldest and largest international development agencies in the world, Plan International works in 49 developing countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas to promote child rights and lift millions of children out of poverty.

In spring 2008 Plan International commissioned fry to develop a new international website.

The website redesign project was managed by a core team at the international headquarters but involved collaboration with over thirty internal stakeholders from Plan programme areas around the world. Our collaborative methodology allowed us to work with Plan staff from around the globe to define the information architecture for the new site and ensure that the strategic objectives of the redesign were met.

Once the website structure was defined, our iterative creative design process delivered a new look-and-feel for the site, pushing the Plan brand forward to create a vehicle for effective online communication. The new architecture and design was then built as a prototype which was subject to rigorous usability testing, informing appropriate changes to improve the usability of the end product.

Plan wanted a cleanly designed site, coded to a very high standard. The fry team have done an excellent job.
John Maughan, Global Online and Publications Manager

The Plone Content Management System (CMS) that powers the Plan website provided a lot of useful functionality out of the box, but required significant customisations to meet Plan's unique requirements.

We adapted the Plone Categorization mechanism to support a navigation which allows the user to drill down from global to local concerns (for example, from International, through Africa, to Zimbabwe). Content authors categorise news items as they are created; these are then automatically included in the new portlets on the relevant page.

Plan wanted a CMS that allowed them to manage not only the main website, but also the websites of national offices across the world, using a single interface.

A unified system allows Plan to roll out their brand identity across multiple websites while giving the members a considerable degree of autonomy. The templates are distinctinctive from the international site, but in line with the same overall brand. The result is a set of apparently separate websites (such as Plan Spain and Plan France) that can share content, all of which are multilingual throughout.