WikiArquitectura.com

An updated brand and website for the world’s largest architecture encyclopedia.

Design

Leaving Wikipedia behind

Launched in 2007, WikiArquitectura started out using the MediaWiki open-source CMS (the same one used by Wikipedia) and therefore had the same exact design as Wikipedia. In 2019, it had been a few years since the backend was migrated away from MediaWiki, and finding no good reason to “look like Wikipedia” WikiArquitectura decided it was time to redesign their site in order to present their content in a way that wasn’t as generic and made sense for the kind of content they provide.

Images gain the spotlight

After carefully studying the site’s analytics, we found that people were looking at photos of buildings much more than they were reading about them, however in the previous design images were left for last and could only be found at the end of each article. The new design gives a lot more weight to the images, both in search pages as well as in article pages, where a fixed sidebar ensures the user can access them at any time while they scroll through a building’s data.

Developed in AMP

The new theme was developed using AMP technology (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to reduce the page load times, optimize server resources and offer a better user experience even when accessing the site from places with a poor internet connection.