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Seramount's Online Portal in WordPress

Processes
  • Agile/Kanban
  • Agile/Scrum
Team Leadership
  • Art Director
    Colin Panetta

We are proud of the work we did with Seramount.

As one of the more mature organizations in an increasingly competitive field, Seramount needed a multidisciplinary business, creative, and technology partner to help position them as a leader in the constantly changing diversity, equity, and inclusion space. 

Seramount is the result of a consolidation of three businesses: Diversity Best Practices, Culture@Work, and the events and research divisions of Working Mother Media. Since they also focus on research and consulting, they were looking for an improved membership experience with their gated content and membership portal. They also needed an improved search functionality and tagging system as well as improved ways to track site metrics. 

Our Approach

Seramount engaged Last Call Media to deliver a more focused and compelling narrative to tie the products, tools, and services from those three disparate lines of business together into an end-to-end solution for purpose-driven leaders and teams at Fortune 1000 organizations. 

Our work began with an assessment of the three lines of business through interviews with Seramount leadership and employees who support the delivery of Seramount’s products and services. We then completed a series of structured customer interviews to learn more about how Seramount meets the needs of its customers. We then used that data to build a product roadmap to gain alignment on the customer opportunity and product vision with Seramount leadership. 

We approached building the new Seramount iteratively. Once we had a working prototype, we met with customers again to show them work in progress, to test our vision and to refine it based on their feedback. 

Challenges

Some of the challenges addressed involved building an easy-to-use online portal for Seramount customers and employees to access and update gated content only available with a Seramount membership. We solved one of the major customer challenges by eliminating the need to use passwords to access gated content. On the new Seramount, customers enter their work email and if their employer is a customer, they get an email inviting them to login to Seramount. By requiring employees to use their own accounts, Seramount now has additional data to demonstrate the value of their membership to existing customers. 

 

The final deliverable is a B2B online learning and development platform built on WordPress.

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Generating complex product comparison pages dynamically.

Team Leadership

A major part of the Finder application is how it allows users to discover and compare various products. Finder produces thousands of pages for individual products and pages to help visitors compare two or more products. This historically has meant that Finder needed to create these comparison pages manually in its CMS, WordPress, with the manual help of Finder’s editorial staff. Comparison pages are now built dynamically, without the manual help of Finder’s editorial staff, meaning they can quickly publish all required pages, especially before major events like Black Friday.

Last Call Media developed a new way to quickly and programmatically surface thousands of pages for Finder. All the data for these products is contained in two custom-built APIs, which also pull data from outside APIs. We were able to build out Finder’s APIs and create a custom WordPress plugin to render pages solely from data contained in the APIs.

This means that editors no longer need to create WordPress pages for coupon pages, allowing Finder to quickly enable hundreds of coupon pages in time for Black Friday, decreasing costs associated with publishing efforts, and increasing revenue by having more coupon pages up faster.

In addition to the coupon pages, work was done expand this system to replace Finder’s manually created pages that compare two currencies. By replacing these pages with API-backed pages, Finder can reduce costs and increase accuracy, as well as develop centralized templates for displaying the information which will allow for quick, global changes and unify the design of these pages.

Now Finder can move faster and provide visitors the freshest information.

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Making it easier to deploy frontend applications.

Processes
  • Agile/Kanban
Team Leadership

Last Call Media developed a microfrontend strategy with Finder’s in-house developers. Using Next.js and Docker, Last Call Media worked to make it easier for engineers at Finder to build, test, and deploy small frontend applications, like tables, that are completely independent of each other, while styled using Finder’s sitewide library of React components.

Finder needs to provide users with tools -like interest calculators- that are quick and easy to use, while still displaying a wealth of information. Because this is a core part of the business, Finder’s large global team of engineers need to be able to iteratively improve these comparison tools based on customer feedback, and test their changes to see what works best to drive user engagement.

As an example of this, Finder asked Last Call to improve their comparison tables. The tables were written in legacy JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We worked to rebuild the tables in modern React, adding modals on top of the tables to surface the most important data filters to the user first, so that, after selected, they’d see the most relevant results. We added advanced interactive features such as calculators to the top of tables so users can input data relevant to their personal circumstances and see automatically calculated savings for each product. 

Finder now has a path forward to build stable, highly-interactive comparison tools for users in a highly iterative way.