The MacDiarmid Institute

The MacDiarmid Institute brings together New Zealand’s leading researchers in nanotechnology and materials science, enabling them to work together across disciplines at the highest level, and remain connected internationally.

The  Institute approached Egressive to redesign the web site to provide a stronger focus on the people involved and their research, along with an update to the visual style. One of their key requirements was to make the administration of the site and management of the content as simple as possible and accessible to Institute staff.

During the analysis of the Institute's requirements we identified a number of primary types of content related to research projects, the objectives of those projects, and related publications and focused on setting up a structure that allowed for simple administration and display of this content. As each Research Theme can have hundreds of publications related to its various objectives, we identified a critical need for a well defined process to managing and import those publications. Other key areas of content such as the News and Events were developed iteratively with our Institute contacts, and the idea of a News Room section was introduced to encompass all of the regularly updated content.

The overall visual style and general structure of the site was a collaboration between MacDiarmid staff and Egressive during our conceptual stage. The high level of customer involvement allowed us to explore and respond to new ideas in a flexible way throughout development and a challenging and dynamic design process which resulted in a high level of quality - and customer satisfaction - across all elements of the site.

We look forward to a continuing relationship with the MacDiarmid Institute and further development of their site to reflect their evolving requirements.

The site went live on the 16 December, 2011.