The Chamber of Architects of North Rhine-Westphalia (AKNW) is the professional representation of architects, interior architects, landscape architects and urban planners in NRW. It offers its members a comprehensive range of services and advice. With over 30,000 members, the AKNW is the largest of the 16 state chambers of architects in Germany. The AKNW keeps the topic of architecture and building culture in the public conversation and acts as a public voice for the interests of its members vis-à-vis politics and administration. It is financed by contributions and fees and is supported by honorary committees. The headquarters of the AKNW is the "House of Architects" in Düsseldorf's Media Harbour.
![[Translate to English:] AKNW Digitale Architektur](/digitalagentur-koeln-muenster/referenzen/aknw/AKNW-Anforderungen.jpg)
Information architects in demand
The digital building project of the Chamber of Architects turned out to be a truly large-scale project. The task was to design and build a structure for 4,000 individual pages, numerous functional and service areas and several target groups.
Logically, for a client who has a soft spot for design and creation per se, the topic of web design would also take on a special significance.
Team building
A four-person client team, reinforced in stages by colleagues and AKNW board members, defined requirements, compiled content and was a sparring partner in workshops and release rounds.
The PPW team consisted of the project management, our conception experts in the UX Studio, as well as six colleagues from the areas of backend and frontend development, who were responsible for the technical realisation of the project.
Architectural principles in design
The site must breathe and radiate architecture.
This was the guideline for the design. Basic geometric shapes, a reduced design open through white space in a simple and serious appearance: these were the principles on which the colour scheme, composition, image style, use of graphics and icons were based.
Open house with short distances
The new website www.aknw.de invites above all the essential target group of chamber members to explore the numerous functions in a new, clearly designed way and to inform and educate themselves about their professional field.
The optimised navigation structure including submenus, clearly arranged teaser boxes, helpful distribution and topic pages and prominent tags for articles ensure a quickly comprehensible user guidance despite the concentrated offer of information.
Functional and service areas such as job exchange, seminar calendar, architect search, news or the powerful Solr site search are always accessible and offer quick access to the full range of digital services.
The relaunch of our website was a major, complex undertaking for the NRW Chamber of Architects. We worked with PPW for the first time - and this decision proved to be the right one. PPW convinced us conceptually as well as in the graphic and technical development of our new website with very good, also individual solutions. The implementation was reliable, service- and problem-solving-oriented throughout the entire process. The joint project work led to a great result and I am looking forward to further cooperation.