A website to grow the BioRegion of Catalonia

Biocat is the strategic agent and catalyst of the BioRegion of Catalonia, the Catalan ecosystem of life sciences and healthcare innovation. Its strategic plan set three priorities: to drive technology transfer, talent, business acceleration and investment attraction; to have a voice of its own to spread the advances of the BioRegion's agents; and to position the ecosystem internationally. The website had to live up to that plan.

Biocat's digital presence was spread across three sites: the corporate website, the Moebio website with the acceleration and entrepreneurship programmes (d·HEALTH Barcelona, CRAASH Barcelona and the short programmes) and the annual report on a separate domain. Whoever arrived had to know in advance where everything was.

The previous inception process had made clear who the website served and what for: investors and executives looking for projects and licences; entrepreneurs and researchers looking for acceleration, funding, training or a way to transfer their technology; the scientific community, the media and agencies looking for sector information; and professionals looking for a job. The brief, through a public tender, was to renew the website completely: a single platform, in three languages, with the Moebio programmes and the annual report inside, aimed at attracting participants, investors and companies and projecting the BioRegion abroad.

We started with conceptualisation: we took the information architecture and user flows from the inception and turned them into the final site tree, the content plan and navigable wireframes for desktop and mobile. Navigation was organised around the three things people come looking for, acceleration, training and investment, and the resources the ecosystem consults every day: directory, annual report, news, agenda and job board.

In design we adapted the Biocat brand to the digital environment and left a web style guide so the identity could be activated across the rest of the ecosystem.

In development we built the platform on Drupal, with a single instance for all content, three languages and a library of modules with which the Biocat team composes its own pages without depending on anyone. We migrated the publications, news, Moebio programmes and annual report with their redirects, so as not to lose the accumulated ranking, and integrated the event and newsletter tools Biocat already used. An editorial workflow with roles and states, a faceted search, AA accessibility, a launch SEO plan and an analytics dashboard completed the delivery, together with training and the editing manual for the team.