The Federal Ministry of Austria needed a high-profile information platform for research, technology, and innovation as well as for the funding landscape in the railway industry. The design and functionality have to be modern and uncluttered. Realisation of an overview of the funding landscape in Austria for research, technology and innovation as well as national funding and support opportunities for technology transfer in the railway industry. Service providers in the railway industry should be given an easy way to enter and customise their services in the database. The competences of service providers should be clearly displayed and visualised in various views. It should be possible to filter the competences of service providers according to categories in a 3D map and to locate them geographically in a map. The design was to be conceived using Sketch so that the client could get an idea early on and be involved in the design process.
The Drupal site looks modern and tidy. Fast loading times and clear navigation contribute to a good overall impression of the site. The search function and special 3D views invite users to browse through the available services and competencies of the organisation. The design was realised in Sketch by our partner company Ast&Nebel. We mapped these specifications for the Federal Ministry in a style guide. This contains all components, shows their presentation in different resolutions, and is available to the client as documentation and starting point for further developments and further projects/platforms. The integration of external scripts such as web fonts was completely dispensed with, which contributes significantly to fast loading times and improved data protection. The theme was completely redeveloped, with a special focus on lean and structured markup. All page elements (fonts, image sizes, line spacing, column widths) scale and adapt to the screen size. Users and editors have access to a special registration workflow including an approval process.
The goal was a website without external requests (JS, fonts, etc). We would have liked to do without cookies, but they were necessary for the user login. So we couldn’t spare ourselves the cookie warning ???? Another small challenge was the “Fields of Activity”. The display of these components depends on a lot of factors, but we didn’t want to deviate from our standard for CSS “BEM – Block Element Modifier”. A GDPR compliant map solution was developed when there was no out-of-the-box solution available. Users get content-aware information, to accept the 3rd party service before they can see the map if they not already approved the privacy settings or denied them previously. While creating and maintaining the website it happens that we run into issues in existing modules or even Drupal Core. acolono GmbH is contributing back all the fixes and modules which were improved or developed during the project.
