Problem

Our partner was unfortunately relegated to a restrictive, complexly structured content management system. This system was convoluted and rendered even the simplest of updates, whether to the software itself or to the content it managed, an insurmountable challenge. This wasn’t the only issue, however. The repositories that held crucial product data were not centralized. Instead, they were widely scattered across a myriad of unintegrated third-party platforms, which only added to the complexity. The specifics related to the e-commerce platform followed the same pattern, further compounding the problem. All these fundamental issues culminated into a customer-facing frontend that was far from user-friendly. It confused their cadre of enterprise users and purchasers, creating unnecessary obstacles in their user journey. Moreover, it failed to serve the brand’s unique and powerful value proposition, thus undermining the brand’s potential to stand out in the competitive market.

Solution

Our approach focused on addressing the most prominent pain points first. The shortcoming at the most detriment to internal IT, content managers, and end users alike was the lack of integration. Our constructed platform was integrated and automated with all available and appropriate client softwares, eliminating monotonous user and manager action previously required, and enabling site platform mangers focus on the most important interventions.

Next was taking a holistic approach to user experience from both the lens of the platform manager and the end user. We developed interfaces in this respect both for the website frontend, but also for portals and utilities used to manage site content and operation. Site operation and clickthrough soared post-launch as a result.

While overhauling the platform was a much needed intervention, we were also cognizant of the potential for disruption in process for platform managers. The content management system hosting the original website was robust and a keen fit, only it had been created and configured in a short-sighted and confusing manner. We chose to let the platform remain on the existing content management system, only on the most upgraded version and leveraging all powerful and robust tooling made available. This coincided both a marked improvement in platform stability and performance but also minimal disruption and retraining of platform managers.

Technology

• Salsify
• Google Reviews API
• Adobe DAM
• ADP API
• Drupal

Differentiators

Our approach boasted three key differentiators:

In our systems design and configuration of this specific content management system, we opted for native feature implementation and organically built integration. Common in most content management system approaches is a heavy focus on third-party plugins and lowest time to delivery instead of truly empowering the platform to resolve client problems. Our focus on as little third-party code as possible resulted not only in seamless integration, but also avoided common code and race condition classes experienced in third-party-plugin-heavy implementations.

Our systems design process deliberately includes the perspectives of platform managers. In this respect, every platform feature and capability is carefully considered for longevity and configurability. We have a dedicated focus to component-based content management system design and it’s our steadfast intent for platform managers to not only manage but grow the site with as little development intervention as possible.

Thirdly, when pertaining to user-generated content, we develop a rigorous quality assurance pipeline to guarantee the integrity of the platform frontend while also integrating the desired content. While leveraging Google Reviews, we integrated both automated and manual review processes to rebuke the usual quagmire that comes with user-generated content review with intelligent, automated filters. But we also created screening portals for manual quality checks for platform managers. Both of these quality assurance controls were then integrated with our CI/CD pipeline to ensure proper review during deployment to each platform environment.

Results

Our platform overhaul produced myriad results within months of launch. Our client saw platform management costs in immediate free fall in savings of automations and integrations. The frontend refresh and web best practices optimizations saw an immediate reconciliation across all Core Web Metrics. Analytics showed immense improvement in user engagement spanning all measured metrics. And in complement with these performance improvements, the post-launch maintenance was scant, indicating a realization in our efforts to produce an in-house and low-touch manageable web solution.