Youth Employment Action (YEA) was established in September 2009 by a transnational consortium of European Youth Forum (YFJ) Member Organizations in order to improve the position of young people in Europe with regards to their access to the labor market, enhancing their employability and making them aware of their working rights.

YEA is targeted at the five million young European people aged 15-24 who are unemployed, and it promotes practical training and projects at local and European levels, exchanging best practices, providing information on employment right and resources and lobbying for constructive action to be taken to ensure adequate and fair employment opportunities for young people in Europe. Online communication is a fundamental part of the YEA strategy.

Website Features

Nuvole determined that Drupal, due to its popularity and flexibility, was the best platform to build the YEA site upon. The YEA site needed six interdependent but separated components:

• News
• Events
• Projects
• Organizations
• Maps
• Static Pages

Each of these was developed as a Drupal feature, making thus the site highly modular: a feature could be enabled or disabled to enable or disable one of the six components, with minimal impact on the rest of the site structure. This made the infrastructure cleaner and easier to maintain.

Presentation of information

Organizations and activities are presented both as lists and as markers on maps. The mapping facility uses Nuvole's OpenLayers Geocoder contributed module, allowing events organizers to just type the address of their events, that is automatically represented on a map; calculated data can be adjusted if needed.

The activities promoted to front page are displayed in an attractive, automatically scrolling, slideshow with images and titles, prominently displayed in the upper region of the home page, to ensure that they will be noticed.

Usability

Since the content had to be taken care of mostly by YFJ staff and YEA organizations, Nuvole focused on the website usability and ease of use from the content editors' point of view.

The Admin theme was chosen for its clear and familiar interface: content editors would an immediately understandable Control Panel, with menu items repositioned by Nuvole to offer the smoothest possible workflow for the YEA site needs.

The content editors were not provided with a WYSIWYG interface to prevent possible layout problems and copy-and-paste issues: instead, Nuvole chose to train them to use the Markdown syntax so they could get their work done faster and still benefit of some useful layout. A mini-reference about Markdown was included in the page editing form.

Social Media and New Media

Being targeted at young people, the YEA site is enriched with some social and new media features, while still remaining an institutional website.

The Twitter integration automatically fetches mini-posts from the Youth Employment Action Twitter account and replicates them on the website. Videos are embedded in some pages and seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site, for a richer communication.