The new Eurodyssey’s website launch marks an important milestone in our programme’s journey. It has been a result of three years of close collaboration between our member regions and the AER Secretariat, from meetings to seminars and trainings.
Featuring stunning new looks and a better user experience, its new functionalities will significantly improve the day-to-day management of the programme.
Three years in the making
This collaborative process kicked off in February 2019, at the 2-day Website and Communications Training hosted by Catalonia’s Employment Agency, where AER Programmes Coordinator, Andrés Muñoz Rojo, together with WordPress Developer Audric Delcour run a full demonstration and set out the main features of the new website.
Following such training, the AER Secretariat opened in Autumn 2020 a testing site for the regional users to get acquainted with the new functionalities and share their feedback for further website development. This testing period allowed the regional correspondents to make suggestions on the user experience and to keep track of the evolution of the website as they discovered the main features of the new website.
Ready, set, go!
This year, on 1 September the Eurodyssey website hosted by AMEOS webmaster was brought down to migrate all the data and files into a new WordPress portal with the technical assistance of web consultant Audric Delcour and the Eurodyssey’s regions.
Given the huge volume of data migrated, it was not until 16 September that the new website was officially launched. During this hiatus, the Eurodyssey regions increased cooperation to manually process the applications of the young candidates.
The size of the Eurodyssey website project can be revealed by the following figures from the data migration process:
- 40,000 attachments saved
- 170 regional admin users
- 40,400 young person users
- 3,600 company users
To facilitate the transition to the new portal, the AER Secretariat published a comprehensive manual for users and organised webinars on 30 September and 22 October to run a full demonstration and answer questions from regions. Furthermore, at the 2021 Eurodssey Forum on 3 December, the AER team shared ideas for regions on how to create an attractive regional profile on the new Eurodyssey website, and how to make the best of its new features.
Nonetheless, the website remains under construction since there is still a lot of pages edition, contents translation, files and media uploads to be completed. Apart from reducing the site maintenance costs, the new portal is expected to revamp the programme and attract more users and potential new regions.