Bluecadet Interactive

The Wistar Institute is an international leader in basic biomedical research. Home to nearly forty principal investigators and ten research centers, Wistar had a website that had grown too large to handle. They had a wish list of functionality for their new site, first of which was for Bluecadet to wrangle the content into an intuitive structure.

Wistar has a large and varied audience, from molecular scientists, to students, to the layman looking to learn. We devised simple tools to help all types of visitors navigate the site quickly. For example, users can go directly to the quicklinks pop-out from any page, which points them to audience-specific key pages. Because many users come to the site looking for a particular scientist, we designed a sleek dropdown with one-click access to the scientists. Each scientist also has his or her own microsite, which is customizable while still upholding brand standards.

Wistar also wanted a much cleaner sitemap. Bluecadet rethought the information architecture, organizing the site's massive amounts of content into a navigable, intuitive structure.

The next item on the list was a way to share all their exciting news. Bluecadet integrated a new blog for Wistar's administration and scientists to post new stories and discoveries. Wistar wanted visitors to be able to interact with the institution online, so we built an online donation module, event registrations, and an interactive timeline that lets users learn about Wistar's history. The site is built with an easily administrable Drupal back end, another item on the list, and designed with the work of Wistar in mind--each of the backdrops are images of microscopic organisms.

Finally, with a new, focused functionality, clean design, and interactivty, Wistar's wish list items were all checked off.

Credits

Creative Director

Josh Goldblum

Designer

Kim Quinn

Producer

Rebecca Sherman

Production Designer

Stacey Wiley

Content Strategy

Cecilia Razak

Production Assistant

Abraham Chen