Islamic Development Bank

Introduction

The Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) is a multilateral development bank dedicated to fostering partnerships, sparking innovation, and empowering communities around the world. Committed to promoting social and economic development, IsDB supports its 57 member countries and Muslim communities worldwide through targeted initiatives and sustainable investments.

Our collaboration with IsDB began leading up to the launch of their new brand in 2018 and continued through late 2022. We worked closely with Dr. Hayat Sindi, senior advisor to the president of the bank to expand its remit. We were solely responsible for developing and managing their primary web platform, isdb.org. This required us to build a digital experience that was both user-friendly and reflective of the bank's expansive vision.

By shaping its online presence, we helped craft a digital narrative that highlights the extensive reach and influence of IsDB's work globally. The platform stands as a dynamic hub for showcasing the bank’s projects, partnerships, and impact, reinforcing its commitment to driving progress and empowering communities around the world.

Information architecture & design

For IsDB, we built a clear and scalable information architecture to meet the needs of its global audience. The goal of the design was to be straightforward with an emphasis on usability, enabling its diverse audience to navigate the site with ease but for new visitors and regulars.

We worked to implement he new brand guidelines throughout ensuring a consistent experience across all supported languages.

The focus was also geared towards incremental improvements. By regularly updating both the design and functionality, we kept the platform current and responsive to evolving user needs.

Dynamic Multilingual Content

We have built many multilingual sites over the years, and each comes with its own unique challenges.

IsDB publishes text in a myriad of ways - in news bulletin form, in official documentation, and according to the needs of each department.

• IsDB publishes text in a myriad of ways - in news bulletin form, in official documentation, and according to the needs of each department.
• In addition to English, Arabic and French the site is also partly translated into regional languages to meet the needs of those regional departments and their audiences.

• This is particularly complex when it comes to content listings, search results, and the administration and maintenance of translations.
• We provided the bank with bespoke solutions, built on top of Drupal's robust multilingual data structure, to best meet these dynamic challenges.

Consolidation

Web platforms tend to reflect the organisations they represent, much in the same as kids look a bit like their parents. When we started working with IsDB, overseas offices were running their own independent web presences on their own infrastructure and operating their content management systems.

This meant a disjointed brand presence and in-consistent user experiences. We visited a number of these Regional Hubs in-person to help design and develop a consistent experience for these sub-sites and give them a proper presence within the main site.

This work took many months to complete, navigate the complex nature of an organisation such as IsDB, to give each department the freedom to show what they required while existing within the main site and leveraging the design and technology available there.

Multi-Departmental Editing

IsDB is a huge organisation split into many departments each with its own specific needs. To meet this challenge we built a bespoke administration interface that compartmentalises content amongst the bank's internal departments.

In this way it is instantly clear who is responsible for what content, even as that content is mixed and repurposed in various ways across the public-facing site.

Our role also included providing ongoing training and support to departments throughout the bank, empowering them to take ownership of their individual sections and their pages.

Cloud technologies

To meet IsDB's global audience the site is served through a global Content Delivery Network and is backed by a number of technologies to provide security, scalability, speed and high-availability. In conjunction with load-balancing, network file storage, cloud database tools and comprehensive backup technologies, IsDB is a site very much hosted in the cloud.

We used cloud search engine technology to provide not only search results but also content listings such as news, thus providing lightning-fast retrieval and spreading load across the cloud. To do this we built a bespoke search document structure to which all content is reduced and stored in a search index.

This also provides a number of other advantages, not least language stemming and the maintenance of a constant queryable index of content across the site.