• Client: Beef & Lamb New Zealand
  • Date: August 2017
  • Roles: Discovery, Design, Front & Back-end Build
  • Product suite: Drupal

By Farmers for Farmers

Beef + Lamb New Zealand Ltd is the farmer-owned, industry organisation representing New Zealand's sheep and beef farmers. B+LNZ's key purpose is to help farmers make informed business decisions and promote their collective interests.

It's all about the knowledge

The pre-existing B+LNZ site had a wealth of information, but this was often buried deep within multi-tier navigation structures and difficult to find (if you even knew it was there). We worked with B+LNZ to come up with a flatter, simplified navigation system and implemented an easy-to-use, categorised search, both of which put more emphasis on the content they were trying to push to their target audience, namely the many useful articles, tutorials and other information contained within the new Knowledge Hub.

The key success factors

  • Discovery to design process

    This enabled us to understand the use and needs of the users and agency alike – navigation and content. Thus, the design decisions made were appropriate to what the real needs of the audience.

  • The knowledge hub

    We created a searchable and categorised collection of content in a variety of formats (PDFs, multimedia presentations, video, podcasts, and standard webpages) to help farmers maximise their growing and business potential.

  • The action network

    With the help of the Red Meat Profit Partnership (RMPP), we developed an online planning tool that allowed farmers to create groups that could apply for funding to pursue various research topics. Integrated with RMPP's own CRM system, this allowed for a smooth and user-friendly way for farmers to put together a funding proposal with the minimum of fuss.

  • Data visualisation and data tools

    There's a vast amount of rich, valuable information to be had within the agricultural sector, so we took that data and used the latest in beautiful graphing techniques to create displays that make understanding and interpreting that information as easy (and aesthetically pleasing) as possible.

Happy client, happy farmers

The new B+LNZ website was successfully launched in late 2017, using the Drupal CMS (and hosted on the cloud-based Pantheon platform). With a clean, responsive interface, a refined, intuitive, filterable search, and a greater focus on highlighting information that best fulfils the needs of the target audience, we provided a website that offers the greatest benefit for the client (and their users) both now and moving into the future.