As a leading global economic institute, the IfW Kiel develops innovative solutions to pressing global economic problems. The aim is to create fair and sustainable prosperity through research, consultancy and education. With a 180-degree change in perspective from the previous website, the presentation of the IfW as part of an international research network has been successful. Thanks to the new, technically sustainable infrastructure, scientists and government institutions can now access the diverse content and services of the IfW more quickly.

Agile development for complex requirements

Through agile project and software development, it was possible to transfer the considerable amount of complex content into an easy-to-navigate site within 10 months. The newly created presence takes on the character of a topic-specific information network through a complex mesh of interlinked content. Categorisation, keywording and facet searches form the basis of the system and allow detailed and cross-content information searches. The international orientation of the Institute is taken into account by a bilingual system. At the heart of the editorial control is a comprehensive rights management system in the CMS with highly differentiated user groups. The user-friendly researcher dashboard for easy operation by research staff with editorial rights deserves special mention. A content and strategy consultation formed the basis of the restructuring after a detailed evaluation and analysis of personas, content and traffic.

Accessibility self-test

In order to guarantee a site with as few barriers as possible, the barrier-free technical implementation, which was considered from the beginning, was tested in a self-test. The complex requirements were implemented with the content management system TYPO3. In addition, interfaces to the IfW's Active Directory and the Institute's address management software (CRM) were created. In addition, there is end-to-end encryption for sending form data from the CMS and an integrated system for newsletter subscription/unsubscription. The use of third-party providers, such as social media services, is made possible through data protection-compliant integration.