Twenty Years of Website Evolution – Without a Hitch

The European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) is the leading voice of obesity science, medicine and community in Europe. They commission research, run training, host conferences, lobby governments, and advise a community of 20,000 professionals.

We’ve supported EASO for over 20 years. We’ve helped their website evolve with them, seamlessly integrating 1,000s of pieces of content and coping with large traffic spikes whenever a story about health hits the headlines.

As the organisation’s scope has grown, we’ve evolved their site over five iterations and created dozens of microsites for specific events and campaigns.

One of the most difficult challenges we helped EASO overcome was introducing a way to manage the constant flow of research, papers, courses, news, and event information onto their site to make it easy for busy people to navigate. It was a significant project.

Working with the EASO team, we reviewed 1,000s of pieces of content. We created a new system of 4 primary categories, with 25 subcategories for each. We redesigned the site to make it easy for members to find what they needed.

But that wasn’t all. Once the information was organised, we created a bespoke theme so that when someone uploads something new, it’s automatically catalogued and cross-referenced so people can find it easily. This has prevented the site from getting out of control. Just as important, it’s given their team more time to focus on their day jobs rather than website admin tasks.

It’s impossible to condense 20 years of an excellent working relationship and continuous technical improvement into a few paragraphs. However, one simple but powerful advancement was implementing pay-as-you-scale hosting. When traffic increased five-fold, due to their valuable information on COVID-19 and obesity during the pandemic, there was no downtime. As highlighted in the news at the time, many other well-known sites didn’t fare as well.