SPREP

The client

The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) is the regional organisation set up by the governments and administrations of the Pacific to protect and manage the region's environment and natural resources. Its mandate, in its own words, is to promote cooperation in the Pacific region and provide assistance in order to protect and improve its environment and to ensure sustainable development for present and future generations. Its headquarters is in Apia, Samoa, with further offices in Fiji, Solomon Islands, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and Vanuatu.

SPREP's members are Pacific island countries and territories, joined by Australia, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States as metropolitan members. Members take decisions at the SPREP Meeting, with an Executive Board meeting in the years between. The work itself runs through SPREP's programmes: Climate Change Resilience, Climate Science and Information, Biodiversity Conservation, Environmental Governance, and Waste Management and Pollution Control. Regional projects funded by development partners sit under them.

sprep.org is the organisation's main public site and the root of a family of related sites. The SPREP Virtual Library, PRISMSS and the Pacific NbS Resource Hub all run on SPREP's domain, and SPREP hosts the secretariat of the Pacific Islands Roundtable for Nature Conservation.

The problem

SPREP's reasons for a redesign came down to the interface, the identity and the content.

The interface of the old site had dated. At the same time SPREP had changed its visual identity, so the site no longer looked like the organisation it represented.

The deeper issue was volume. SPREP publishes continuously and across many kinds of content at once: news under each programme, publications and factsheets, project records, events, circulars, tenders, vacancies and the documents of the SPREP Meeting. On the old site that body of content had become hard to find.

The brief that follows from those problems: an interface that is current and carries SPREP's new identity, and a structure in which a large and constantly growing archive can be found. In both rounds of work the answer was a redesign of the user interface and a rebuild of the Drupal theme that renders it.

What we built

We redesigned the sprep.org interface and rebuilt its Drupal theme twice: first in 2017, then again in 2024. The 2024 version is the sprep.org running today. The design side of this work is what our UI/UX design service covers, and the theme build falls under Drupal development.

A theme is the layer every visitor sees, so the current design covers each kind of page the site carries:

• A main navigation grouped under About Us, Our Work, Resources and News, with a utility menu for careers, circulars, tenders and the SPREP Meeting.
• A homepage that opens with featured items and summaries of SPREP's programmes, then latest news, latest SPREP publications, current projects and upcoming events.
• News filed under the programme names, so a reader can follow one area of SPREP's work, with separate sections for speeches and for news in French (Les nouvelles du PROE en français).
• A publications listing with a keyword search, a choice of items per page and a direct download for each publication.
• A projects database listing each project by short name and full title, tagged with its SPREP programme and sortable.
• Pages for governance, history, members, the team, accountability and transparency, and SPREP's role as a convention secretariat.
• An events listing, site-wide search, and links out to SPREP's information portals and the Virtual Library catalogue.

On the current site the same programme names recur in the navigation, in the news categories and in the project tags, so content can be reached by programme, by type (news, publications, projects, events) or by search.

Our role

We worked directly with SPREP on both redesigns, with no agency in between. The scope in each round was the UI/UX design of the site's interface, then the Drupal theme that renders it. After launch we stayed on to maintain the site; that ongoing work is what our Drupal support service covers.

SPREP hired us for the 2017 redesign and came back to us for the second one in 2024. The relationship has since grown past the main site. SPREP has given us further sites developed from sprep.org: the Pacific NbS Resource Hub and PRISMSS were both built on the base of the SPREP site. SPREP also commissioned the SPREP Virtual Library from us directly, and referred us to the Pacific Islands Roundtable, a body affiliated with SPREP, whose site we built on its own.

The result

The 2024 design is the sprep.org in service today, running on the theme we built, and we maintain it.

The result we can point to is a returning client. SPREP brought the 2024 redesign back to us after the 2017 one, then widened the work beyond its main site. PRISMSS and the Pacific NbS Resource Hub grew from the sprep.org base, the Virtual Library and the Pacific Islands Roundtable site were built separately, and each of them is running today with us maintaining it.

For a public body weighing the same kind of project, this is what the engagement covered: interface design, the Drupal theme, and maintenance after launch, from one team. More work of this kind is on the government and nonprofit and intergovernmental pages.