Case Studies

The website was produced by MarketDirect Business Communications on behalf of the World Diamond Council (WDC), which is a body that was created in 2000 to coordinate the effort by the international diamond and jewelry industries to prevent the trade in rough diamonds that have been use to finance civil conflict. The website is located at www.worlddiamondcouncil.org. It was launched in October 2010.
 
In producing the website, MarketDirect worked together with Alessandro Bertoni, who is an IT consultant based in Udine, Italy.
 
The WDC website replaced an earlier edition, which was created several years after the establishment of WDC. A second website, called Diamondsfacts.org, which provides information about the campaign against conflict diamonds for a non-professional audience, is also operated by MarketDirect and Alessandro Bertoni on behalf of WDC. The worlddiamondcouncil.org website is directed more at a professional audience.
 
The purpose of the WDC website is to provide information about the organization, its ongoing activities in the campaign against conflict diamonds, and to act as a resource for its members and members of the diamond and jewelry industries.
 
A key event in the calendar of the WDC is the organization’s Annual Meeting. Hosted at different locations, it is a gathering at which assemble members of the organization from around the world, as well as representatives of governments, international associations and civil society groups. The WDC wanted the website to provide a comprehensive record of each meeting, and an elegant design concept was created, which enabled each meeting to occupy a separate page, with a overview of the meeting provided, as well as links to the speeches, presentations and photographs that specific event.
 
An important  purpose of the website is to underscore the fact that WDC’s work on behalf of the industry is ongoing. For that purpose it was deemed necessary to create a homepage that would be dynamic, changing as new items are loaded on the website. This was achieved by linking elements from the website news and media sections to the homepage, meaning that each time additional news items, photos and/or video are uploaded, the appearance of the homepage is altered.