SIL International is a nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide as they build capacity for sustainable language development. SIL does this primarily through research, translation, training and materials development. SIL's linguistic investigation exceeds 2,590 languages spoken by over 1.7 billion people in nearly 100 countries.
THE PROBLEMS:
SIL’s legacy website was a repository of tens of thousands of documents and static pages built on different technologies. Each department within SIL was responsible for maintaining their own domain which led to inconsistent branding. The site had several integration points and ran on several subdomains which were interlinked, but disjointed. The combination of those two issues led to a challenged site architecture, user experience, and brand perception. After several failed attempts to consolidate a massive amount of data onto one platform, SIL was at a loss.
The Solutions
After several months of reviewing data, interviewing departments and understanding organizational goals, LevelTen was able to create a cohesive site architecture that supported SIL’s brand proposition, incorporated input from all departments, consolidated data systems and provided a robust and well well-organized Management System. Using Drupal 7, Acquia servers, over 70 modules and a lot of know-how, we were able to:
Create a responsive website that aligns with SIL’s brand identity
Departmentalize content creation based on group assignments
Integrate with 3rd party data systems to consolidate and organize tens of thousand of online publications
Serve pages quickly using Acquia’s Dev Cloud
Significantly improve searchability of data through a faceted search system
Collect user information through content subscriptions
Sell products and track purchases
THE RESULTS:
Working as team SIL and LevelTen were able to successfully migrate, organize and display data in a more intuitive way and on multiple device types. The results have been impressive. Average time on site has increased. Page views have increased. User acquisition has increased. Company morale has increased. Brand perception is high. Languages are being sustained. LevelTen was able to create a single code base to allow SIL and the LevelTen Team to easily and regularly spin up websites (multisite) for SIL's world languages such as mexico.sil.org,peru.sil.org, silpacific.org.
