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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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Annual Fund’s 25th Anniversary Campaign.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

The Advancement Department of Amherst College needed an updated brochure to support their efforts of encouraging donations to the Annual Fund’s 25th Anniversary Program campaign. Last Call Media was excited to build upon our technical experience migrating Amherst to Drupal and in building the Title IX iOS App with a project that could showcase our marketing strategy and design talents.

How we did it

The twenty-fifth anniversary year is an important one for advancement activities. Alumni have generally attained career and financial stability by this time, and it is an important moment in which to encourage a lifetime habit of giving to Amherst College. Amherst needed an accessible and compelling visual that would explain a complicated funding program. Working within existing guidelines and style templates, we worked with the Annual Fund to build a tri-fold brochure that plainly communicated the benefits and procedures of giving during the five years leading up to and including an alumnus’ twenty-fifth anniversary reunion year.

brochure 2

brochure

Staff reported that the leave-behind brochure was incredibly helpful for both their volunteers and donors, and twenty-fifth anniversary giving broke fundraising targets and records in 2015 and 2016.

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The new RMA.edu.

Processes
  • Agile/Scrum
Team Leadership
  • Senior Architect
    Tom Fleming
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

Randolph-Macon Academy desired a responsive digital experience that incorporated a consistent, compelling design focused on furthering the school’s mission, and that could easily be modified by appropriate staff with the proper permissions.

How we did it

We were able to deliver modern visual stylings and multimedia capabilities that loaded quickly and performed optimally, while incorporating best practices for analytics, social media integration, and search engine optimization.

Three layered screens show the landing page and secondary pages of the Randolph-Macon Academy website.

In addition to informing prospective students and their families about the school, the site met the needs of other important stakeholders such as current parents, current students, alumni, faculty, and staff— each of whom had their own needs from the site. The site also housed faculty and staff human resource forms and information, serving as an intranet behind the scenes.

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Leveraging our Scaffolding and Drupal 8.

Processes
  • Agile/Scrum
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

Since early 2014, LCM has continued a productive, ongoing partnership with Chicken Soup for the Soul, and supports their web properties and the associated infrastructure. Recently, Chicken Soup asked LCM to launch two new and completely different Drupal 8 sites within a month. LCM worked off of prototypes from Chicken Soup for the Soul and was trusted to move quickly. By deploying two separate teams of 2 developers, LCM was able to take each site from prototype to launch on D8 and Pantheon within two weeks, while another team maintained the ongoing feature release schedule on Chicken Soup for the Soul’s massive Drupal 6 site.

In June of 2016, Chicken Soup needed a simple site for their rapidly-growing television and online programming production and distribution business. The site needed to handle a collection of content pages and videos, and was intended to be another microsite that would follow some standard templating and functionality as laid out for previous Chicken Soup sites LCM had worked on, and new sites that were still to come.

Chicken Soup was looking for an alternative approach.

Building new features to support growing business lines inside their massive aging Drupal 6 site was becoming unsustainable. Over time, the site had accumulated so much functionality that each deployment ran a high risk of breaking something, which led to lengthy deployments. Recognizing that issue, a plan was developed in partnership with Chicken Soup for the Soul to spin out a series of smaller, more focused sites sharing a similar architecture. Drupal’s modular architecture, and particularly Drupal 8’s approach to dependency management, made it a great fit for this task. Additionally, while the core CMS functionality of Drupal 6 worked well, the UI was becoming dated and cumbersome to work with. Drupal 8 featured a lot of usability enhancements, such as the built in WYSIWYG, that would make the site much more usable overall. Finally, the feature set of the site was tightly focused, and after consideration, we were able to implement it with a small handful of contributed modules, and very little technical debt. 

Following on the success of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Pet Foods site, Last Call Media used a similar formula: leverage Drupal 8 core wherever possible, and avoid contributed modules. This was a great strategy in terms of avoiding the turmoil of early Drupal 8 contrib churn, and had the side benefit of keeping the site very lean and performant. After experiencing some past pain points in using the bare “Configuration Management” system in Drupal 8, we chose to use the Features module on this project. Features makes it easy to bundle configuration into modules, and makes it easier to share configuration (in the form of Drupal modules) between the brand’s sites should the need arise in the future. 

The site uses Last Call Media’s boilerplate Drupal 8 scaffolding build, which helped jumpstart the development process by providing a suite of best practices and quality assurance tools with no extra effort.

The goal of this project was to build a flexible marketing site capable of showcasing Chicken Soup for the Soul’s entertainment offerings; primarily their TV shows and online videos. The biggest obstacles the project faced were the looming deadline, the relative instability of Drupal 8 immediately following the initial release, and the lack of contributed modules that were available to us. For example, the Media-related modules we would normally use for the online video section were not stable yet. Instead of using a media/file entity as we normally would to store an online video, we leveraged Drupal core’s new URL field to store the URL of the Rumble video, and used a field template to output an embed link. It was a simple and elegant solution to a difficult problem. 

Thanks to excellent communication with Chicken Soup for the Soul’s Digital Strategy team, and Last Call’s experience in working with Drupal 8, we were able to turn the project around in just two weeks. This met the deadline set by the marketing team, and achieved all of the goals that were set out. 

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Redesign and upgrade for Dr.G.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Development
    Tom Fleming

An upgrade to increased conversions, better sales, and more flexibility.

Competitive Advantage was experiencing a decline in their online sales. Their existing website was outdated and originally built as hundreds of static HTML pages, some inconsistent with the others. Additionally, the main site was originally laid over top of an aging proprietary eCommerce solution that wasn’t serving their needs or their customers well.

We worked with Competitive Advantage to update the design of their website, port it to the most current version of Drupal, and migrate away from their former eCommerce system to Commerce. Improvements to the checkout workflow were implemented, product images were updated, and full content control was given to Competitive Advantage to maintain product copy.

Three iphones show the Competitive Advantage homepage on mobile.

Since the transition, Competitive Advantage has seen their eCommerce sales far exceed their expectations and more than double in volume from their previous site.

We truly appreciate everything you have done for us.

Dr. Alan Goldberg, Sports Performance Consultant
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Catalog integration for Queens Library.

Processes
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership
  • Senior Producer
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Architect
    Kelly Albrecht
  • Senior Development
    Kelly Albrecht

Team augmentation for increased capabilities.

Queens Library needed to integrate its developing content management system into its Book and Media Catalog systems to display realtime information and allow interaction between site visitors and its collection.

We were approached for assistance in developing the custom module foundations for these integrations.

We joined the Queens Library IT team and provided coaching as well as custom code.

Our engagement included working with in-house developers and other development teams to build custom modules, displays, and workflows to complete the integrations. Handoff of our work included training and enablement of internal Queens Library developers.

Queens Library launched its new and fully integrated website on Drupal as an interface to display realtime catalog information and facilitate customer interaction.

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A national treasure migrated to AWS with no downtime.

Processes
  • Agile/Kanban
  • Continuous Delivery
Team Leadership

StoryCorps is an independently funded organization that collects, shares, and preserves people’s stories to remind people of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between us, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters. All collected stories are stored in their online archive, accessible to the public upon submitting a request or listening to recordings at various public library listening rooms. StoryCorps reached out to LCM for ongoing support and assistance with migrating their site’s archive of roughly 27TB worth of interviews and information to a new AWS platform. 
 

The main StoryCorps Archive access point was built on a robust Drupal platform consisting of over 60,000 interview records and approximately 27TB of associated metadata, WAVs, MP3s, JPGs and PDFs. The StoryCorps Archive platform connected with several critical business systems and performed around-­the-­clock ingests from their on­site storage arrays to the Drupal system, via rsync. StoryCorps was looking for a trusted and capable firm to migrate their entire Archive— including the website, connected services, and media— from their single-­server host to a combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2, S3 and Glacier.

Last Call Media performed a thorough analysis and audit of all StoryCorps’ source data prior to and following the massive migration. We worked closely with StoryCorps’ internal Digital Team and engineering consultants to design, test, implement, and ultimately maintain the new AWS server infrastructure.

The archive is now running smoothly on a robust AWS setup, configured to allow the platform to efficiently scale and grow as the archive does; to the next 27TB and beyond. 
 

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Let’s make moves!

Team Leadership
  • Art Director
    Molly Taaffe

This summer, Last Call Media teamed up with Blackboard to build a new customer-facing site, using a component-based design system that could afford content editors novel flexibility while still reaping the benefits of a content management system. 

In building out Blackboard.com in Drupal 8 this summer, we found a fresh opportunity to position Blackboard as a user-friendly, customer-focused, and modern brand — the big idea was to introduce subtle elements of motion design into the theme in order to create a more engaging user experience. 

So, once we’d built out the new site architecture, components, and theme, we shifted our focus to visual refinement; our goal was not only to guide users through their experience through the use of animation, hover effects, and motion design, but also to delight visitors in subtle, unexpected ways by thoughtfully introducing some of these elements into the theme.

Goals

The main goal of this effort was to liven up the site and encourage users to interact with elements on the page. As an unintended consequence of implementing a highly flexible component-based theme — in which pieces of content could be mixed and matched in basically unlimited ways on any given page — the overall look and feel had come out very clean and organized, but at the same time more boxy and “dull” than we’d anticipated! Alongside this, there was also the challenge of giving the theme an institutional, educational feel that still felt friendly and helpful instead of overly corporate and austere. 

Process

The first step in the process of adding microinteractions was to make sure the interactions were unified in their intent. For example, a rise on hover means the item is clickable, and if implemented on something that doesn’t click, would confuse the user.

Hover is a near universal sign for “this is clickable”, so we utilised a hover effect with shadow for the menu. For buttons, we opted to change from a simple color fade on hover, to a left to right swipe to change the color. This is more engaging than a simple color change, but it isn’t distracting from what the call to action is asking the user to do. It also matches the movement exhibited in the menu when items are hovered over. This addition of motion design to the menu helps users better understand where they are in a detailed navigation, and have a stronger understanding of the menu and product hierarchies.

menu interaction example

Some other elements of movement added, purely for aesthetics and to engage the user, were a hover effect where the background shapes move behind a product shot when moused over. This added interest to otherwise somewhat repetitive images of computers, and hopefully caused the user to take a second look. Another was a fade and slide in of images, from the side the image is on. This creates a very welcoming feeling as you scroll down the page. In addition, we added a video background to the banner area of the homepage, tinted Blackboard blue so as not to distract from the text and call to action button over it.

pause video example

In order to maintain our accessibility standards we had to think about users that may not be comfortable with the video at the top of the homepage, so we included a pause button to stop it from playing.

pause video example

Results

The team at Blackboard is happy with the results of this effort, and it brings a really fresh engaging experience to the site. We would love to do another round of user testing (link to solution story about that) to see how or why these additions add to the site for users.

Microinteractions are a great way to engage the user, and add a wow factor to your site. However, we believe that handling these specifically and thoughtfully is the only way to achieve an effect that really makes sense to the user, rather than just a decoration. This means that every movement and reaction should be consistent and rational, with a meaning and result that are predictable to the user after a short period of interaction. We look forward to bringing what we learned here to anything we work on to add another level of sophistication.