De Druglijn

De Druglijn website is the Flemish reference for information about alcohol, drugs, pills, gambling and excessive gaming.De Druglijn is a distinguished online resource, with almost one million visitors in 2022.

Their mission goes beyond just providing information; they are committed to being a compassionate listener and a source of knowledgeable advice for those grappling with these challenges.

Recognizing the multifaceted nature of addiction and its impact, De Druglijn extends its support not only to individuals directly dealing with substance use and addiction but also to their friends and family. They understand the critical role that loved ones play and offer specialized assistance to help them effectively respond and cope in situations where someone close to them is affected by drug use.

Their previous system had reached the end of its life. Support was discontinued and the platform could no longer be maintained, so migrating wasn’t optional. De Druglijn’s service depends on being reliable and easy to reach, and the new site had to protect that: uninterrupted, and with room to grow.

Webdesign

A new brand identity was already in place, so we built the layout from their Brand Bible. We led with a single primary color and brought in the brand’s secondary colors selectively across the site. Each drug topic carries its own color, and pages that share a color belong to the same topic. That gives visitors an immediate sense of where they are and what they’re reading about.

Platform Choice: WordPress

The new CMS had to be open source. We didn’t want De Druglijn locked into a single studio or a proprietary system, so we chose a platform that stays operational and adaptable regardless of who manages it. Right now, that’s us.

We went with WordPress. A wide range of authors would be managing content, so the CMS needed to be genuinely easy to use, and WordPress is. Its visual editing is built in, which meant no extra page-builder plugins and a straightforward day-to-day experience for the team.

Development

The site is built entirely on WordPress using native Gutenberg blocks. We developed each component once, and De Druglijn can place it anywhere they like. Every block carries its own set of options, so it adapts to whatever a page needs: colors, spacing, fonts, backgrounds, and buttons.

For faster editing, we set up premade patterns and reusable blocks. With a pattern, the team can build a new page from scratch in minutes, every component already filled in with its preset options. Reusable blocks go a step further: update a block once, and it updates everywhere it appears across the site.

Migration

De Druglijn is a content-heavy website, and the organization has been around for a long time. They saw the new platform as a good moment to proofread everything they had. Page by page, they went through the existing site and rebuilt each one pixel-perfect on the new platform, checking that all content and colors carried over.

We then drafted a redirect map so every old page pointed to its correct new location. The new site uses a clean, SEO-friendly URL structure, so this step mattered.

Deployment

De Druglijn already had a hosting account running several sites alongside this one. We deployed the new site to that same hosting to avoid paying twice. We handled the DNS settings and installed our CI/CD pipelines on their setup, so we can step in quickly and ship hotfixes where needed, with no downtime on the live site.