Croatian Veterinary Chamber is the umbrella organization that represents veterinary clinics throughout the country, organizer or co-organizer of most major events related to the world of veterinary medicine in Croatia, publisher of the Croatian Veterinary Journal for over 25 years, and an institution that has decided to keep up with the times and make extensive use of internet tools in communication with their target market.
A few months ago, they placed their trust in us and contracted us to design their new website. Below we describe some of the biggest challenges of that project.
What was not a challenge in this project?
In short, the challenge was not to surpass the old website.
It’s hard to find words to describe it, except that it was made in the nineties and hasn’t been changed much since then. Therefore, we didn’t need to do much to make the new website a huge leap compared to the old one, but our goal was not only cosmetic improvements. The primary goal was to ensure that our clients at the Croatian Veterinary Chamber would have a future-proof website that would not become outdated after some time, that would remain dynamic and always up-to-date, and the basic prerequisite for that was simple content administration.
Challenge No.1: How to make such a content-heavy website not boring?
An important fact in the story of creating the hvk.hr website is that it will never have a lot of content on its homepage, and the content it does have will mostly be interesting to a very specific target audience. Therefore, we cannot rely on colorful special offers, which usually give websites some appeal.
Moreover, this is a specific target audience, which we are sure would not be thrilled with technological innovations on the web, and any deviation from the norm would likely irritate them and compromise their user experience.
So, the new hvk.hr website must not be “boring,” but it should not deviate too much from the typical format either.
Therefore, we opted for a slightly different approach – designing a homepage that will not be the same as most others on the internet, with content frames that stand out with sharp lines, somewhat messy and nonlinear structures, large icons, and big photographs.
Challenge No.2: How to make content management as simple as possible?
We will try to explain the issue in the following way – the people who manage the hvk.hr website are academics, not programming experts, and their first request was to enable them to manage content easily. This is often the biggest fear of our clients, especially those who have had bad experiences with previous websites, i.e. those that were impossible to edit without touching their source code and hiring a programmer.
Therefore, we promised our clients at the Croatian Veterinary Chamber that they would be able to manage all the content elements of the homepage and internal pages independently, without having to engage us every time they want to publish something new on the web. Below is a short gallery of the interface we created in the backend of the website, where we upgraded the standard WordPress capabilities and further simplified the future administration of the hvk.hr website.
And, once we have done all this, what comes next?
First of all, we expect that in a few weeks, the hvk.hr website will be flooded with a wealth of quality and professional content – just like their Journal. Our clients are in the process of creating this content and are slowly starting to enter it on the web.
The next step will be to create multilingual content and publish it on the website using WPML (the most advanced multilingual plugin for WordPress), which we have already integrated and is just waiting to be fine-tuned.
After the content-related prerequisites are fulfilled on the website, the potential of email marketing will be extensively used – specifically Mailchimp, which we have integrated into the website, and we have provided the client with instructions on how to use its interfaces to create email marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
After weeks of intensive collaboration with the Croatian Veterinary Chamber, we have the impression that this is an institution that does not give up in the face of circumstances but enthusiastically moves forward, eager for new opportunities and possibilities that our era brings. They have seen the internet as a way to get closer to their target audience, and we are confident that they are not mistaken in placing huge hopes in its potential. Our help and support are always at their disposal, as the best way to thank them for the trust they have placed in us.
We wish them lots of fun working with the new website!
