Early Stage to define the International Press Center’s and the Belgian Presidency of the EU’s web strategy

A couple of months ago, Early Stage has been charged by the International Press Center* (Brussels, Belgium) to fully re-think the vision & strategy of two websites: (1) the current http://www.presscenter.org website, that is the website of the official press center of the Belgian Government, and (2) the future website of the Belgian Presidency of the European Union to be held from July to December 2010. This mission resulted in a deep « As is/To be » study which inspired the further analysis, design & development of both websites (still in progress).

// Approach

Early Stage used a strong methodological approach to systematically:

• clarify the main guidelines & fundamental orientations of the websites (centralization of information, openness & transparency, multimedia integration…)
• identify the targets (end-users) and analyze their needs & constraints
• define the key features aimed at boosting the websites’ attractivity
• propose a first user-centric information architecture

All this was achieved by means of focus groups & workshops, individual interviews, deep documentation analysis… and of course a lot of braistorming within the team as well as personal reflections!

// Challenges

Our mission for the International Press Center covered – at least! – three challenges:

1. Professionality

Because the main targets of the websites are professional actors (journalists, spokesmen, Europe’s civil agents…), our main challenge was to give the websites a real feeling of what we call « professionality » – the art of maintaining a professional appearance and attitude while projecting a tremendous amount of personality.

It is of course of huge importance for both the end-users and the International Press Center & the Belgian Government that clear, precise and official information & services be provided on the websites.

2. Citizenship

Another important challenge was to improve Belgian and other European citizen’s engagement towards public life & institutions.

Achievement of that was made (1) by providing « rich » (through the use of multimedia contents, e.g.) and accessible information, and (2) by affording appealing and useful tools (cf. widgets like tag cloud, Twitter block, polls, quizzes…) and services (« My Press Center », e.g.) to visitors.

On top of that, a huge work on user experience issues was done by means of benchmarkings and qualitative user testing.

3. Technology

A last – but not least – challenge of the project was a technological one.  The open source Drupal platform was chosen as an underlying layer for developing and maintaining generic and website-specific modules & features as well as for providing the content editors a rich and easy-to-use end-user interface.

When you know that Drupal – a Belgian product – is used as the White House’s website underlying platform, you have a good feeling it can help achieving professionality & citizenship challenges..

As a matter of fact, eGovernment & Government 2.0 projects definitely embrace key aspects of our daily life such as vision, values, emotion, creativity, innovation and democracy.  And this is why cutting-edge projects like this one make us proud to just do what we do!