Lernwerk

Lernwerk in Windisch supports young people and adults on their way into the labour market, provides care for unaccompanied minors from the asylum sector, and operates a range of social businesses from a kitchen to a bike workshop. A website for a company with this variety has two challenges to solve at the same time. It has to address completely different audiences cleanly, from those directly affected via referring authorities through to donors and clients. And it has to ensure that all content is accessible to people for whom complex language is a barrier. Together with our agency partner, we built the site so it does both.

The design comes from mehrwert Agentur in Baden; technical lead, implementation and ongoing operation are with us. Technologically the site runs on Contao Open Source CMS, a platform we have been committed to as Premium Partner for over 18 years. For Lernwerk we developed the theme from the ground up to mehrwert's specifications, building it around the visual language, the colour system and the editorial requirements of the social enterprise. Since the standard Contao content element repertoire could not cover the specific needs, we programmed several custom content elements that the editorial team can now freely place into pages.

Each thematic area of the site has its own layout with tailored imagery and navigation, so the Integration section feels different from the Social Businesses or the About Us sections. The Lernwerk offering can be narrowed down through a custom filter function by target group, programme type or subject area. A particular element is the interactive time journey in the About Us section, which makes the history of Lernwerk from its beginnings to today visually tangible. The search too we developed ourselves and integrated into Contao, so it can handle the many areas and specialist terms of Lernwerk.

A special requirement was accessibility for people with reading difficulties. We built in an option for "plain language" that switches text passages to a considerably reduced version with short sentences, simple vocabulary and clear structure. The editorial team maintains both language versions in parallel, so every content page can be designed with inclusion in mind. For a social enterprise with a heterogeneous audience, this is not a nice-to-have, but a basic requirement for the website to fulfil its purpose.

We have been looking after the site continuously since launch with maintenance, updates and targeted further development. The project shows how far Contao reaches when the CMS is understood as a flexible foundation and extended purposefully for the requirements of each client. The combination of custom content elements, thematically differentiated templates, custom search, time journey and plain language makes the Lernwerk website one of the most substantial Contao projects we have delivered in recent years.