Making historical articles and archives readable, beautiful and accessible. South African History Online has tens of thousands of articles, images and documents.
Making historical articles and archives readable, beautiful and accessible. South African History Online has tens of thousands of articles, images and documents.
South African History Online (SAHO) is the premier people's history website with a mandate to write a new history of South Africa and Africa. South African History Online has grown into the largest public history, educational and heritage project in South Africa. SAHO’s site currently comprises around 35 000 archived items which are added to on a weekly basis. These articles are linked to a growing archive of documents, journal articles, online books, photographs, videos and audio clips.
The brief was to update the design and functionality of South Africa’s premier history website and archive. The work included coming up with a new, fresh, easy-to-use redesign. The design also had to recognize the fact that this website has been around since the 1990s! That meant there are very low-res images in its archive and we had to keep with small images while at the same time revealing powerful content. Since the site's conception, the audience has moved onto mobile devices. We refigured the content and the navigation to reflect this. We also updated the CMS and redesigned their logo, giving the site a complete front-end and back-end refresh.