De Druglijn helps with all your questions about alcohol, drugs, pills, gaming and gambling. Anonymously, objectively and without judging or condemning.
Focus on accessibility and diversity
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.
Platform migration
A platform migration was crucial for De Druglijn due to the obsolescence and discontinued support of their previous system. This strategic update was vital to ensure continuous, high-quality service and to future-proof their digital presence for enhanced functionality and better community service.
Webdesign
A new branding was already in place and we could use their new Brand Bible to build the website layout. We opted for a vibrant and dynamic approach, selecting one primary base color complemented by the subtle yet strategic use of the brand’s additional colors across various pages.
To enhance user experience and clarity, each drug topic on the website is represented by its own distinct brand color. This thoughtful color-coding system intuitively guides visitors, clearly indicating that pages sharing the same color scheme are dedicated to providing information about that specific drug.
Platform Choice: WordPress
It was absolutely necessary for the new CMS to be open source. Our choice was driven by the desire to avoid depending on a single agency or proprietary system in the future. To this end, we decided on an open-source CMS, ensuring that the website remains operational and adaptable, irrespective of the agency managing it (in this case, us).
Our platform of choice was WordPress, renowned for its ease of use and gentle learning curve, making it an ideal fit for De Druglijn. Given the variety of authors who would be managing content, it was crucial that the CMS be user-friendly and accessible to all.
WordPress stands out not only for its simplicity but also for its advanced visual page editing capabilities, which are available natively, eliminating the need for additional page-builder plugins. This choice ensures a seamless, efficient content management experience for Druglijn’s team.
Technical aspects
Development
The website is completely built on WordPress making use of the native “Gutenberg Blocks”. This makes it possible to develop all the single components on the website and De Druglijn is free to use them anywere they would like.
Each building block has a specific set of additional options, to ensure it fits all exceptions necessary, such as colors, spacing, fonts, backgrounds, buttons, …
For rapid content editing, WordPress also comes with premade patters and reusable blocks. With the pattern, they can create completely new pages from scratch in just a few minutes as all components will be prefilled with all the preset options. The reusable blocks make it so that if they use the same block on different pages, they only need to update it once to also update it everywhere else on the website.
Migration
De Druglijn is a very heavy content website. The organization already exists for a long time and saw the new platform also as a good excuse to proofread all the content on the website that they currently had.
They manually went through each page on their existing website and build it pixel-perfect again on their new website to ensure all content and colors would fit.
Afterwards we drafted a redirect map and made sure all the old pages of the website would be redirected to the correct locations on the new website. As the new website uses a clean URL structure optimised for SEO.
Deployment
De Druglijn already has a hosting account that’s also hosting other websites than the one we’ve built. Therefore we deployed the new Druglijn site to their already existing hosting to prevent double hosting costs.
We took care of the DNS settings and installed our CI/CD pipelines on their hosting – so we can quickly assist and make hotfixes to the website were necessary, without downtime on the live site.
