ABOUT

SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) is a global scientific membership organisation whose website needed to serve a wide range of audiences — researchers, members, delegates, volunteers, and the general public — while managing a vast volume of text-heavy content, ongoing events, and an extensive research document library.
The original site was built on Drupal with a legacy DocMan system, which had become difficult to maintain over time. Content editing was cumbersome, layout flexibility was limited, and document management created ongoing security and update friction. Union 10 undertook a full Drupal-to-WordPress rebuild, approaching the project as both a design challenge and an information architecture exercise. Before any design work began, they researched how other content-rich, text-forward sites handle readability and navigation — insights that directly shaped the typography, layout system, and page structure.
The result is a flexible, block-based WordPress platform built for SCAR's scale. Long pages were made more readable through shorter line lengths, strong visual hierarchy, and jump links that let users navigate dense content quickly. Rather than locking the team into rigid templates, reusable section blocks give editors the freedom to adapt layouts to suit different content types. The DocMan research library was migrated from the legacy system and rebuilt with custom blocks, letting SCAR group and display documents by topic without developer involvement. A centralised team directory means staff, members and volunteers can be managed in one place and automatically reflected site-wide. Global options allow event promotion to stay consistent across multiple pages without repetitive editing.
Completed in August 2023, the project delivered a modern, maintainable platform that makes SCAR's complex content genuinely easier to manage, publish, and read.