SIAM’s investment in technology modernized their website — and brand.
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is an international professional community. They boast over 14,500 members, and nearly 500 academic, government, and institutional members. Their mission is to nurture cooperation between mathematics, science, and technology through research, publications, and community.
There are 17 distinct research areas, and within are publications of over 30 peer-reviewed journals and books. They host several conferences yearly, providing opportunities for networking and community for members. In addition, they offer educational and professional programs for students, and advocate for STEM education and science policy.
Founded in 1953, SIAM produces a wealth of content, and even the oldest publications are still valuable for members. With new content coming out regularly, and old content still used for research purposes, they needed better content management. Thus, the challenge became creating meaningful structure and a system that could manage it easily.
Saying goodbye can be hard (or how to go from 5000 to 500 pages).
SIAM’s current website was 15 years old, contained content dating back to the late 1980s, and was actively used. We conducted user interviews, focus groups, and gathered organizational input to learn more. During this discovery phase, we learned that even the oldest content was still useful and needed to be accounted for.
While designing the user experience, Brio prioritized organizing the most important content in meaningful sections, with access to older content. Using input from SIAM’s user base, we created a central location for publication and program content from their 17 research areas. We combined duplicative pages, reducing page count by 10% and creating concise, easy-to-digest sections on the website.
The more custom the CMS, the more simple the management.
Before rebuilding their website, SIAM’s team needed extensive HTML experience to make updates to the website. Although they spent 15+ hours each week on site updates, they still had duplicate content and other missed updates.
SIAM intended to transition day-to-day website content management from the IT department to Marketing. This meant they needed a system that could be updated with little to no coding experience necessary. This is where the LiquidContent functionality that comes with the DNN Evoq Content platform comes into play.
With LiquidContent, we designed 30 unique types of content, each with a hyper-specific fieldset related to content displayed to users. With this in place, the SIAM’s marketing team only needed to enter content into a form-like interface. This interface automatically formatted content to match the current style guide and show in the correct location. With this entry type, a single update would display relevant content in multiple locations.