UKNC for UNESCO

A high-performing, creatively designed website with optimised performance.

Project Overview

The UK National Commission for UNESCO (UKNC) website raises awareness and promotes the benefits of UNESCO programmes in the UK. The existing site needed overhauling to improve its structure, functionality, and visual design to improve engagement with target audiences. The organisation's updated brand values and identity made a new website crucial to reflect these characteristics and improve outcomes for the UK National Commission and those using its website. Accessibility compliance was key for funders, including The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

VISIT WEBSITE

Our new website celebrates UNESCO across the UK, and we are truly delighted with the results of the hard work and expertise of NB Communication. From start to finish, they have been a joy to work with, and the fact that the company is based in the Shetland UNESCO Global Geopark, makes the results extra special.

James Bridge Chief Executive and Secretary-General

Background

The United Kingdom National Commission (UKNC) for UNESCO website needed updating to improve accessibility, engage varied but strategically important audiences and reflect its new brand identity. To improve user experience, there was a desire to simplify navigation, allowing users to easily discover information about UNESCO sites in the UK. As part of the redesign, the UKNC required a new resource library providing information and education for UKNC audiences.

Challenge

As a large organisation with varied audiences and dozens of valuable resources part of the challenge was finding a creative way to structure and categorise the content. The site had to be easy-to-use, while meeting modern accessibility standards and adopting a design that reflected the brand's new visual identity. It also needed to reflect the UKNC's expanding role and be clear about the separation from UNESCO while acknowledging the affiliation.

Solution

The desire to reach and engage new audiences made it important the UKNC website is scalable and flexible, with a simple, more streamlined structure and improved navigation and search functionality. NB's team created a new resource centre with search and filter capabilities, ensuring the range of assets is easy to browse. A key part of successfully delivering this was migrating the website to NB's favoured CMS, ProcessWire, allowing resources to be easily uploaded and categorised. Designs were refreshed to align with UKNC's updated branding, and using fewer page templates gives consistency throughout.

1

Explore UNESCO's UK sites

Impressive sites are at the heart of UNESCO, and the UK Commission wants to make it easy for people to discover these spectacular places. With more than 60 sites across the United Kingdom, separated into five categories, NB developed an interactive map allowing website visitors to search by location or category. With clickable visual logos representing each category and an intuitive zoom function, it is simple for users to get to the information they are looking for quickly.
2

Eye-catching categorisation

The homepage includes a wealth of content, and it was important to present this attractively and efficiently to encourage users deeper into the website. The Explore Our Sites section users animated slides to capture attention and encourage viewers to click through to discover more about different kinds of designations.
3

Visualising UNESCO's history

Founded in the dark aftermath of the Second World War, UNESCO has a fascinating history defined by its messages of peace and understanding. The UK Commission wanted to tell the story in an engaging and informative way. We achieved this by creating a visual timeline highlighting key moments in the organisation's past and using archive images to add visual interest to the organisation's fascinating story.
4

User-friendly resource library

As part of an international organisation, UKNC for UNESCO's website had to present hundreds of documents from major research studies and strategy documents to maps and factsheets about designations. To make the extensive library of images easy to use, NB ensured the resources are searchable, and can be filtered by Topic, Type, or Year of publication.
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