We developed a communications and technology strategy and built both a main website for EMBARQ’s headquarters in Washington, DC and a custom site distribution that powers EMBARQ’s independent centers around the world, including Mexico, Brazil, and India. Their new network of sites allows them to reach out to an audience speaking at least four languages about practical sustainable transport initiatives. Since it is based on a common code base, this solution also helps keep maintenance costs down for a broad network of sites since they’re all on the same code base.

Our external communication strategy with EMBARQ focused on how we could help create a new network of websites to feature their work around the world to diverse multilingual audiences of policy makers and industry leaders. In particular, they needed their new websites to allow them to balance centralized, program-wide communications with more specific, localized content nuanced for the policy makers their regional offices are trying to educate.

Since EMBARQ focuses on developing and supporting sustainable transportation solutions around the world, particularly in emerging and developing countries, custom maps were very important to show where their projects are operating. For their central hub site, we developed a beautiful new site design to make their multimedia content stand out, a simpler information architecture to make browsing their content more intuitive for users, and a sustainable way to translate their video content for international audiences.

For their regional centers, we identified a narrowly focused set of shared user stories that would represent a common denominator among each center’s needs. Based on those shared user stories, we built a custom Drupal installer profile for creating new sites so that each site is completely autonomous and can develop separately from the rest of the network, yet share the same core. As long as customizations are not necessary, this approach keeps overhead low since each site is essentially identical to maintain. At the same time, this was approach was important versus a more integrated multi-site deployment since the growth of each center cannot be predicted, and we wanted to leave EMBARQ with as many options as possible for future growth.