A national natural resources agency, with a bilingual website organised the way the agency works.

AKBN, the National Agency of Natural Resources, protects and administers the interests of the Albanian state in hydrocarbons, minerals and energy. Its website serves operators, partners, researchers and citizens, so it has to show what the agency does, publish what it produces and make its services easy to find.

The previous website was ten years old and had not been updated. An agency that publishes reports, notices, services and legal information needs a site it can keep current, so we rebuilt it from the ground up.

The structure follows the agency’s own work. The home page puts the agency’s services, the legal framework and the register of requests and responses first, followed by general projects, reports, brochures, the Executive Director, news and notices.

• Four directorates, each with its own page: Hydrocarbons, Mining, Hydropower Monitoring and Renewable Energy
• Reports, scientific data and projects separated by directorate, so each audience finds its own material
• Publications and brochures on mineral resources, renewable energy and hydrocarbons
• News and notices, including job vacancy notices, in their own sections

Each service the agency offers to the public has its own section, so a company or institution can see what is offered before it makes contact:

• Physico-chemical analyses of minerals
• Technical mining opposition (review)
• State technical opposition
• Verification of the coordinates of mining permits
• Preparing and issuing studies for mining projects
• Monitoring of hydropower plants
• Certification of the technology card

Public bodies are expected to be open about what they do. The site gives that its own place:

• A transparency programme and a section of transparency for the public
• The register of requests and responses and the page of the Right to Information Coordinator
• A form for requests and complaints, an integrity plan and a privacy notice
• Open data: reporting and statistics published for anyone to use

Beyond publishing documents, the site works as a service point: operators have online services and reporting. The agency already had a GIS platform, and we integrated the website with it rather than replacing it, so the site works with the platform the agency already uses for spatial information.

The Renewable Energy directorate presents ten international projects: AquaNEX, LED, SEADRION, Re-Source, BLUE DEAL, TARGET, G.A.M.E.S, Pro-Energy, SEADRION PLUS and C4N, each on its own page, together with the agency’s partners.

Every section is available in Albanian and English with a language switch, and the two versions are linked to each other so that search engines and visitors reach the right one. The Albanian site is the default.

The website runs on WordPress with a custom theme written for AKBN rather than a bought one, so its layout, sections and menus follow the agency’s structure. The contact form is built in and the multilingual setup is handled by WPML.

The launch is not the end of the work. BOTA maintains the website on an ongoing basis, so it stays up to date and working, which is what the previous site lacked for a decade.