Croatian Writers Society – The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword, Especially on the Web

Goal

The Croatian Writers Society has grown into an eminent (and one of the leading) art associations in Croatia in the last 15 years. As the membership and readership changed over the years it was necessary to create a new website which would provide more information to visitors and members of the Society in a new, clear way.

Even though writers are masters of words, they still needed professional help with the new website, which they found in Perpetuum. On the other hand, cultural projects are no novelty for our company and providing support to Croatian Writers Society through the making of the new website is just a continuation of the good practice.

Solution

First and foremost, the website needed to be, more visually attractive, informative and easy to navigate, just like a good book. That’s exactly why it was designed to please and fit both visitors and administrators. The rubrics were refreshed, the most important and most searched topics were made to standing out, also, the search for interesting events was optimized with the installation of a calendar. Special attention was dedicated to a section with resumes and creations of the authors/members.

In order to function smoothly, the system was based on the Drupal CMS and iSite Open solution. Drupal has proved to be an ideal platform as it has the ability to manage digital content without the intermediation of IT specialists and designers, and can additionally be upgraded to various components in order to meet the needs of the Society in the future. Just as fantastic books, the new website of the Society didn’t have a specific (draft) design, but it was created as, the story or the development of the site went on. The greatest challenge was the archive of texts in a custom made CMS system, which was supposed to be “transferred” to the new system. Since it was a bigger archive, our experts designed a special module that analyzed texts in the old CMS system and moved them to a new one. Thanks to such creative thinking, instead of „the eternity”, moving the files lasted a few minutes.

We took it a step further and prepared a video tutorial in episodes for their administrators, which complements the user’s documentation and helps them with managing the system. It’s little to say that we’ve gotten many nice words from our client for such a creative approach.

How satisfied was the Society with this solution and our cooperation is best describing the fact that a new project has already been agreed upon – creating a comprehensive portal for literary criticism to which we’re already looking forward!