Washington Office on Latin America

WOLA follows a lot of different aspects of Latin America, and as such, they write a lot of content for their website. This presents an obvious challenge: how do you prioritize and highlight the most important pieces, without ignoring or demoting everything else? And how, without a full-time webmaster on staff, do you even manage to post information before it becomes outdated?

For starters, we moved the back end to Drupal. This open source system makes it relatively quick to post new content in both English and Spanish. Also, the system of categories lets staff classify each item by issue, country, and WOLA program at the same moment it's posted. Once an item has been categorized, it appears automatically in the appropriate places on the site.

Goal: Organize the vast amounts of content on the website, and present it in a way that isn't overwhelming.

The categories help site visitors navigate content, too. The homepage offers jump menus that go straight to all content on a certain country or issue. Personally, I use these often, because I’m usually wondering “what’s WOLA doing in Argentina?” or “what do the WOLA experts think about the election in Peru?” or something fairly specific like that.

Goal: Give each WOLA program its own landing page, with the power to feature the content of their choice.

As I mentioned before, many of the lists on the site will update themselves automatically; for example, all content in a given country or issue area, or all videos regardless of their subject matter. However, for the WOLA programs, each program team wanted to have a page that they could control more precisely. For the “featured content” area of each program’s landing page, we used Drupal’s Nodequeue module. This way, staff can drag and drop items to arrange them on the page.

Goal: Call attention to WOLA's team of experts.

Experts are listed in the "About WOLA" section of the site, and each one has a full bio with photo. We took it a step further and used Drupal's categories to connect folks to their respective programs. This way, each program’s landing page also features its experts in the right-hand sidebar. Each name links directly to the person's full bio with photo.