Eisenhower Foundation Case Study

Discovery

The Eisenhower Foundation approached us with an existing, fully functional website that was visually out of date and non-responsive. The existing site was hard to navigate for public users, and content maintenance by Foundation administrators was tedious and difficult. Due to the impending dedication of a new national memorial for Dwight Eisenhower on the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the Foundation sought to create a new web experience that would both engage and inform the public on Eisenhower’s legacy.

Our team initially met with the Eisenhower Foundation and created an advanced discovery proposal outlining the entire scope of the project, allowing the Foundation to approach investors for funding. Once the project was fully funded, our team met with the Foundation to review the project plan and designs. Due to the needs outlined in the discovery, it quickly became apparent we would need to find an easy to use interface that allowed regional leaders to drag and drop content within the website while maintaining the core benefits of a Drupal installation.

Buildout

During discovery, we planned the buildout and outlined every content type, site-wide component, and items that needed to be migrated and rethemed. We then organized these components into manageable sprints that could show frequent progress to the client. Careful planning and management had to be done to ensure that goals and timelines were met.

Step one of the development was spinning up a new Drupal site. We then began to retheme each individual component, carefully testing to ensure that designs remained consistent across devices. Once individual components and content types were successfully showcased and passed our internal QA, we focused on tweaking the remaining individual components and migrating the data.

Due to the drag and drop requirements presented in discovery, we choose to utilize the new Layout Builder module, which allows us to create page templates that non-technical users could easily drop content into. As one of the first development shops to utilize Layout Builder in a production environment, we were faced with multiple challenges in the initial implementation. After working closely with the module developers and contributing back our own improvements to Layout Builder, we began to build out and style the page templates.

The Foundation also requested that educators have special access to the content on their new website, with the ability to save articles and resources into custom collections on their account. This functionality would enable them to gather resources for their classrooms, and easily reference or send links out to the students with the appropriate resources. We utilized the Drupal Flag modules, which allowed us to natively create customized lists that contained references to internal pages.

Throughout the buildout process, our project managers QA’d features and styles on the website as they were created and pushed to our development server. We regularly handed off sections of the site to the client for QA, ensuring that everyone had tested and signed off on the style changes prior to launch.

Launch

The new Eisenhower Foundation website delivers a modern, responsive website that gives them a competitive edge in the marketplace. Content is easily editable through Layout Builder’s drag-and-drop interface for non-technical content administrators worldwide. Response time and user experience are improved, and all existing events and accustomed customer workflows remained consistent to ensure a seamless client and consumer transition. Educators are also able to quickly collect and share resources from the website to their classrooms. Due to the new user experience that Code Koalas created, The Eisenhower Foundation is better able to engage and interact with supports and users around the world, positioning them to capture new traffic and be a critical trusted source of information for students and teachers regarding Dwight D Eisenhower and his role in the Second World War.