This project was started by Cathy Nguyen, as she was the Course Coordinator at ALYNEA. During that time, she helped migrants and people in need learn French and integrate into the French system. As she started creating a collection of resources in her free time, she started the Pantou-FLE project, destined to make these resources as accessible as possible. The Pantou-FLE Facebook page currently has over 3.8k likes. I joined the project as using my skillset to help people in need was very rewarding. I designed for Pantou-FLE a new logo and branding for designed and built a brand-new website.
Challenges
The old website uses Google Sites and therefore gives low personalization options, and the UI and UX make navigation and browsing resources inconvenient. Some of the top priorities were:
- Design a logo compatible with the brand.
- Build a design system that allows coherence and consistency between the website, and social network pages
- Provide a faster, SEO-optimized, more straightforward website that would make resources easy to read and access.
- Allow building resources collaboratively using a CMS, which would be easy to use.
Solution
This logo was supposed to represent things that both Cathy and I love: Dogs 🐶. It also has a French béret and look happy to be learning; most of the resources on the website are trying to keep this light and colorful playfulness to make learning French less discouraging (we know it can sometimes be).
The website use Gastby, a framework that generates pages at build time (SSG) to be blazing fast and SEO optimized. I also used Contentful a CMS, allowing the creation and management of resources collaboratively and efficiently. Contentful offers the possibility of using Rich Text to create complex resources that React can consume using the @contentful/rich-text-react-renderer library. Rich text provides excellent flexibility for Cathy to create her resources, whether PDFs, audio recordings or iFrames pointing at other resource websites. The website is hosted at Netlify, allowing webhooks to trigger a new build on each change in the CMS data. The latest version of the website is then automatically deployed.
We're currently migrating all the resources to the new website and will then release it to the public.
Feature highlights
- The new logo is particularly successful. We are receiving lots of good feedback about it.
- The new website is fast and looks cleaner.
- A newsletter built using Revue.
- Rich text use allows for great flexibility.
Gallery
