IISD Experimental Lakes Area
Project Categories: Content Management / Interactive / Web Design /
the project
The IISD Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) is the world’s largest freshwater research facility and is a highly prestigious and influential source of scientific data for freshwater ecosystem research.
We greatly enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with the parent organization, IISD, to develop a new website for the ELA showcasing the various areas of research and scientific activity at this facility.
Our work focused on organizing a complex information architecture to manage all of the content and research on the site in a meaningful way. We defined the different user groups that visit the site and created sections for each. We also met with various stakeholder groups within the ELA to understand their particular needs so that we could design the website to serve their interests, as well as integrate with the information architecture as a whole.
We designed the frontend look and feel of the ELA website to highlight its uniqueness and still be compatible with IISD’s style guidelines. The designs were then used as a basis to custom-build new templates. A nice backend interactive feature is that we incorporated flexible content blocks that the ELA staff can use to pull in content from other sections and structure each page in an optimal way. Additionally, we created interactive maps of the facility and lakes, allowing users to find a geographical view of the content on their website.
