Last week, we attended the annual WPEngine Summit in London, where our client, Amnesty International took to the stage to talk about how WordPress has inspired the brand to change internal processes and redefine content control from a centralised office.
Caroline Courtney, Digital Content Coordinator at Amnesty International, spoke at the event about how utilising WordPress across the suite of Amnesty websites has allowed her team to solve problems including inconsistent branding, expensive one-off site launches and duplication of work across different workflows and prioritisation of best practice.
The Amnesty branded WordPress theme, built by Big Bite, also allows for new functionality to be added on a regular basis which can be shared to all teams across the globe, resulting in more features, and a much faster process of putting new sites and content live around the world.
Amnesty approached us in 2018 with a key aim, to simplify digital processes and build a single reusable framework which would allow the movement to meet the increasing demands of publishing numerous websites, micro sites and website rebuilds across the globe.
The core theme has been built using the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, which allows the team to produce stunning websites quickly and efficiently while holding onto a unified brand identity throughout each region. The user-friendly theme allows for various content blocks to be inserted, moved and edited easily from the admin and populated with text, links and images. Accessibility and performance were key to us for this project due to the vast number of people using the theme across the globe, including teams from third world countries.
The theme has been built using a variation of prompts, custom Gutenberg blocks, nested blocks, and predefined styles, giving non-technical editorial staff the ability to create and arrange content to build out websites for various locations.
The full Amnesty WordPress theme has now been released as an open-source theme, Benenson, to encourage contribution throughout the WordPress community, in order to help Amnesty International reach their goal of having a single reusable framework that the whole movement can use. This allows them to focus on giving their worldwide supporters the best possible experience in finding and acting upon the issues that truly matter to them.
For more information on how we helped Amnesty achieve their goals, head over to our case study.
