The Council on Foreign Relations

A Siloed Experience Lacking Flexibility

While CFR's original website offered incredibly rich content ranging from editorial pieces to long-form think tank reports, the site's organization made it hard to access. Code and Theory was challenged with creating a cohesive site experience that would be clear for users and streamlined for internal teams.

Understanding Audiences Continued

This wide variety of audiences means users with only a basic understanding of a foreign policy issue may come to the site looking for more background and context. Other visitors might be looking for expert commentary and recommendations while crafting actual foreign policy.

This spectrum of familiarity with the material challenged Code and Theory to develop innovative ways to help users find the right content based on their level of understanding.

Building a Flexible Ecosystem Continued

The new platform is built around flexibility, variety and scalability. Moving away from static page templates, a modular system offers reusability and makes it possible to grow the site as a system.

Communicating the Breadth of Offerings

To improve discoverability, the site taxonomy was refreshed to surface more user-friendly terms that still meet the needs of the internal teams. Site search was reimagined, delivering better visibility for experts, making it easy to find and filter content across all formats, and dynamically displaying related content hubs like topic pages and program pages. To better leverage side-door traffic, trending keywords were added to the global navigation, improving the communication of important issues in CFR coverage.

To better promote the offerings of the organization, we gave special attention to informational pages, building a modular system that worked for hundreds of largely evergreen pages. This makes it easier for visitors to easily understand what CFR does and get involved with membership programs, education initiatives and outreach programs.

An Immersive Reading and Watching Experience

The primary component of the site is a vast number of articles of varying lengths and “reading levels.” To empower the authors and editors, an article toolkit was developed, offering a set of features that can be used directly from the CMS by anyone. While the old site required special teams to develop assets and only selective use of publishing features, this new article system offered the full suite of options (with a low learning curve) to all publishing teams.

A suite of user-centric features were also developed. Top-of-page pathing allows users to easily find related content from novice to expert; a seamless transporter at the end of the article offers related options. For event videos, we introduced a chaptering system to help users navigate long videos and built an interactive transcript and mini video player that makes it easy to watch the video while reading along.