Our work
Migrating multiple global websites and brands to a single platform
- Major digital efficiencies across global estate
- Transformed marketing agility
- Scalable and flexible solution
- Drupal
- Acquia Site Studio
HERE'S THE FULL STORY
The Situation
Our client was looking to migrate their estate to Drupal, streamline brand implementation and reduce hosting and maintenance costs. They needed a design system that could serve their wide landscape of brands and speed up builds of localisations that would naturally scale with their ambition.
The Challenge
How do we re-platform 23 major brands, operating in dozens of languages and markets, all with their own visual identities to a single platform, in a year, AND give power to marketers to tailor their message?
The Ask
Migrate all sites to a completely new technology and set the foundation for a true Master Design System.
Why?
So marketing teams across the globe can own their marketing schedule, publish and launch campaigns, when they want to, and not be dictated to by their legacy tech.
Our Solution
We created a Master Design System that was composed of ready to use layout patterns alongside templates for different types of content. The Site Studio Style Guide Manager allowed multi-brand theming through a user-friendly interface allowing for flexibility within guard rails.
The design system was thoroughly documented in a Functional Design Specification which was continuously kept up to date alongside every sprint to capture changes and new features.
All design patterns were created within Sketch to use as a base for the documentation. The Sketch file was shared with design agencies to give them a head start on design work. This ensured agencies were set up for success and greatly limited deviations from the design system during rollout.
Training and ongoing support for both design and build agencies was a priority throughout the rollout to ensure timelines didn't slip.
Drupal CMS
The estate was migrated to Drupal which meant reduced licencing and technical management costs while allowing low-code editing to market level publishers.
Our engineers worked closely with Acquia to ensure all back end solutions integrated with Site Studio and established a package deployment workflow allowing platform-wide updates to be delivered seamlessly.
Acquia Site Studio
The Master Design System was built in Acquia Site Studio to allow low-code editing for market-level publishers. Global teams are able to publish, build pages and edit when they wish, but with guardrails so they can't go off-road.
This transformed speed to market as there was no longer reliance on technical or agency teams to make changes. It delivered real digital efficiencies and marketing agilities, followed by a global roll-out to global agency brand partners.
23
brands migrated
100%
increase in speed to market
5x
quicker site builds
This was a monumental program. A major decision was made to move to a completely new technology and set the foundation for a true Master Design System. It would be based on a "build book" of design patterns and templates, fortified with a flexible library of proven components that could easily be moved and configured, enabling markets around the globe to launch sites at a fraction of the cost with significantly improved time-to-market. The volume of sites slowly built with maximum velocity kicking in with February 2021 being our most productive with just over 100 sites going live in one month!
None of this would have been possible without a tremendous amount of global teamwork from our partner Coherence Digital in reaching a very aggressive timeline.
Global Digital Product Director, Fortune 500 Consumer Healthcare company
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