Balancing needs and a massive migration

Mana Mokopuna have a vision of Aotearoa where all mokopuna live their best lives. Their website is a key channel for sharing their advocacy work and research with policy makers and other advocates. They approached us to design and build a new website to replace their current website which was non-responsive, hard to navigate, and no longer represented their brand and strategic focus.  

Mokopuna are at the heart of everything Mana Mokopuna does, so our first step was to speak with people who advocate for mokopuna. We interviewed whānau, teachers, and advocacy and policy advisors to identify the types of content they look for – what was working well and ways to improve the experience.
We uncovered conflicting needs between the groups: whānau needed simple, plain-language, and visual content, while researchers and policy-makers valued “deep-dive” reports. This insight informed the site structure and  highlighted the importance of creating clear pathways for each audience group.

After retesting the new site structure our next step was to develop an interface that was on-brand, reflected the bicultural nature of Mana Mokopuna, and represented a place where mokopuna and whānau were welcome. Alongside a greater use of imagery, a new typeface was introduced to complement the Mana Mokopuna tohu and koru. Next we developed an approach to grow bilingual content overtime with flexibility in the CMS: the navigation will always be bilingual, with kupu Māori first, and primary, secondary, and tertiary titles can appear in both Māori and English.

We knew how important reports were to researchers and policy makers, but a manual migration of  publications to the new website would be weeks of work for kaimahi. The existing data was in a different structure having come from another content management system (CMS). This meant the main challenge was reversing the existing structure of the publication data, scripting the retrieval of that data, and collecting the best assets to best match the new design of each of the publication types. Along the way we also improved what we could in terms of SEO, page speed, and content. The outcome was 100's of pages of content migrated from the old site. Although not a 100% success rate due to issues with the content, these were easily tidied up for a tidy collection of publications with improved layout and SEO. The wagtail cms is intuitive, powerful and very flexible for content authors to build pages.

So many little decisions and changes together both from a design and build perspective have made a big difference. The result speaks for itself and we are delighted to be working alongside Mana Mokopuna as a strategic partner to make ongoing improvements together.
https://www.manamokopuna.org.nz