Triple commemoration projects

The First World War Centenary Partnership is led by the Imperial War Museums and consists of some 3,900 non-profit organisations across the world. These range from local to international cultural organisations. Their aim was to host a number of events and activities to commemorate the lives of those involved in the First World War a century later.

The initial tasks

The Imperial War Museums first engaged us on behalf of the Partnership to create a new campaign site called WomensWork100. The objective was to recognise and celebrate the working lives of women in the First World War, against the backdrop of the struggle for female suffrage. Once this site was completed, IWM were so pleased with the result that they asked us to work with them on two more projects.

The second project

In the second project we re-designed and modernised a theme for the main website for the Centenary Partnership, taking elements of the WomensWork100 campaign to create a fresh new look for the Partnership’s content. The main site included blog posts from as far back as 2011 and we needed to automatically migrate the structure of these posts to make them work with the refreshed design. This was not always an easy task, especially as some of the posts contained embedded formatting and images!

We also needed to work with an events feed from the third party Culture24 platform. The previous developers had done the integration for the legacy site but we needed to perform some additional mapping to make the categories and date ranges fit the search functionality for the refreshed site. It is often a challenge to build on top of other developers’ code but in this case it made budgetary sense to enhance the existing integration rather than start from scratch.

Finally

The third project was the Armistice 100 Days campaign, which involved a brand new literary format – the “Centena”. These pieces are exactly 100 words long, with the first three words being the same as the last three words. 100 Centena pieces were commissioned by the Partnership, each inspired by the experience of a real individual in the First World War, and one was published each day in the build up to the November 2018 Centenary.

We needed to ensure that the campaign site was visually interesting and engaging, from the first day with one Centena only through to the last day when all 100 were available on the site.