Digital Relaunch
Together with the agency Heimat (Berlin) we created the website handwerk.de, a campaign by the Zentralverband des Deutschen Handwerks e.V. (the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts) with the aim of attracting young people to apprenticeship professions in the skilled crafts trade.
The challenge
Our task was to create an informative and at the same time entertaining, motivating website. A portal that addresses a central, essential topic for young people – their choice of apprenticeship – but which at the same time also offers space for campaigns and informational materials aimed at secondary target groups like association members and journalists.
A multidisciplinary concept
The aim was to design a structure that expresses the diversity of the skilled crafts trade and makes it tangible on a personal level, while also creating a comprehensive overview of the image campaign.
Explorative user structure
First and foremost, this project was about creating an informational website. We wanted to guide the visitors to the site in a structured way, but also give them the opportunity to navigate the pages exploratively. We also wanted them to work with the website: with an innovative, clear search function it is possible to search for specific content, while a personal checklist within the off-canvas navigation allows the user to save pages to read later on.
Dynamic contents
The website features current social media content from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Special modules like “Profession of the Day” and ingenious campaigns like “Hol dir meinen Job” (Come and get my job!), produced by Heimat and complemented by great videos by the Berlin film production company BIGFISH, round off the visual experience.
The job profiles
As the central point of the website the redesign of the job profiles was one of the major challenges of this project. With existing texts and image material from the previous website our mission was to create a completely new, high-quality design that intuitively conveys the website’s core message.
Crosslinking the job profiles
For the job profiles it was very important to us to implement a transparent linking concept. The visitors should always be able to move from profile to profile within the total of eight trade groups, in order to maintain the best possible overview of their different options. The profiles are therefore now strongly linked: within a group it is easy to switch between the profiles and at the end of every page additional suitable professions are recommended.
Each single profile also has up to five core attributes. With these attributes, which are based on a Germany-wide categorisation by the Federal Chambers of Craft & Skilled Trades, it is easy to quickly find similar job profiles that fit into categories like “outdoor” or “indoor”, “technical” or “creative”.
Attention to detail
The result is a solid website with a modern look, where static information and dynamic contents go hand in hand. This was a project with a very tight time schedule, but nonetheless enjoyable, which, regrettably, we didn’t have the opportunity to develop further in a second phase.
