Microsite Solution with Episerver DXP

At the forefront of pediatric medical research, Seattle Children’s Research Institute (SCRI) is working to cure childhood disease in partnership with Seattle Children’s Hospital and Seattle Children’s Hospital Foundation. The institute consists of nine major centers and is internationally recognized for its work in cancer, genetics, immunology, pathology, infectious disease, injury prevention, and bioethics. 

When it came time to elevate the experience for SCRI, it was no surprise that the researchers wanted an immersive experience that showcased their research at the forefront. With a variety of researcher websites already published on the web, our goal was to not only produce that immersive experience but also bring all the other websites into brand alignment. This presented a variety of strategic considerations. 

• How do we create a new immersive experience on top of the existing Seattle Children’s website? 
  
• How do we consolidate all of the external researcher websites onto the Episerver Digital Experience Platform (DXP)? 
• How do we take advantage of the ROI that could be gained from an SEO perspective by bringing all of the external websites under a unified domain? 
  
• How do we modernize the Seattle Children’s digital brand while staying within the organization’s brand guidelines? 
• How do we integrate SCRI into the existing information architecture for seattlechildrens.org? 

With the shared understanding that the research team wanted to be hands-on during the redesign of their Center and Lab websites, we took a high-touch and iterative approach to the design process.

This included user research, element collages, style vignettes, content planning, and low/high fidelity prototyping. This allowed the teams to be engaged on a weekly basis and keep the feedback loops as short as possible. In the end, the new research center and lab designs were able to truly represent the cutting-edge nature of the research SCRI performs in new and exciting ways. 

In order to bring the SCRI website designs to life, we leveraged Episerver as the technical foundation for these new microsites. This was a key component in ensuring that all of the new websites conformed to the Seattle Children's branding guidelines.

While guaranteeing the success of the SCRI microsites was our primary focus, we used the opportunity to strategically introduce new features and functionality to the Episerver implementation that could be leveraged to bring ROI to other areas of the hospital in the future.

This laid the groundwork for some of the most successful campaign microsites that Children's has deployed in over a decade. Today, new research centers and labs can be rolled out with zero developer intervention ensuring the breakthrough research that SCRI performs is at the forefront of their online presence

Research is most often performed by teams and not just specific individuals.

It was important to SCRI that we were able to showcase the teams that make everything possible. As part of this effort, we modified the structured data system (a custom middleware application) to include research teams. This allowed teams and their individual contributors to be displayed anywhere on the seattlechildrens.org website, putting faces and names to the groundbreaking research that has helped so many children around the world. 

An often-overlooked aspect of microsite development is a plan for website search integration. In order to make sure that any information stored within the SCRI microsites was available when searched for on the seattlechildrens.org website, we utilized a custom Elastic Search provider to unify the search results.

This allowed for the SCRI content to be weighted in the website search results equally with the standard seattlechildrens.org content. Furthermore, it allowed us to create additional search interfaces that are constrained to the SCRI microsite content only. Lastly, this cross-platform search solution has laid the groundwork for a more user-centric and contextualized search experience across the entire Episerver DXP.