As the world’s largest independent marketplace for digital advertising, AppNexus delivers powerful enterprise technology for buyers and sellers of digital ads. The marketing team at AppNexus needed a robust digital platform to communicate their value, experience, and products to bring potential ad buyers and sellers together to support their goal of creating a better internet.
After the completion of a series of creative exercises, the LCM team delivered a modern, dynamic, global rebrand of AppNexus.com in fewer than 5 weeks. The platform tested well with key audiences and led to tangible positive business outcomes for AppNexus, including helping facilitate their multibillion-dollar acquisition by AT&T.
Theming swiftly and efficiently with components
One of the major outcomes of this project was a dynamic yet simple to use site building experience for content authors and theming experience for front-end developers. A component-based approach allows AppNexus to browse a library of reusable content patterns to build pages that are on-brand throughout the site while also making it easier for front-end developers to implement creative feedback.
Using Mannequin, our component library tool, the front end team was able to focus on standard front end technology without worrying about CMS implementation details to quickly theme the front end using paragraphs. This was useful as many of the front end developers on the team were not familiar with Drupal but were able to theme parts of the site easily using Mannequin.
The homepage animations, a critical piece to the visual experience, were delivered by the front end team who used particles.js.
Managing first impressions and talent recruitment in one spot
To support their rapid growth strategy, AppNexus needed a robust careers section, “Life at AppNexus”. The careers section highlights the authentic employee experience at AppNexus, the various teams, the application process, and clear calls to action to their Applicant Tracking System (ATS), COMPAS, which is embedded in the Drupal CMS. Job applications are pulled in from COMPAS. With this new talent acquisition initiative in place, AppNexus is able to efficiently promote itself as a desirable place to work and creating a positive first impression for prospective candidates, leading to increased direct hires.
Increasing analytical visibility using Marketo
By implementing a Marketo integration that sends form responses directly into predefined workflows in AppNexus’ CRM, we were able to give more visibility into valuable business analytics that were not previously captured. AppNexus was also able to utilize their content more effectively for lead generation, by introducing gated content such as whitepapers.
With multiple vendor involvement and a tight timeline, the AppNexus project had a lot of moving parts from the start. Even with frequent changes, LCM, the creative agency, and AppNexus benefited from a frictionless, highly collaborative, and efficient working relationship, which lead to a compelling and well built finished product.
Wentworth Institute of Technology is a technical design and engineering university in Boston, Massachusetts. Wentworth is continuously investing in creating transformational educational experiences for its students and embracing a culture of innovation and creativity.
The goals of the institute translate directly into the digital experience they need to provide to visitors of wit.edu, their current and prospective students, as well as faculty and staff. Last Call Media has been a close partner of Wentworth for years, helping them accomplish important milestones and solve challenging problems: to create an inspiring and meaningful user experience, develop a seamless process for hundreds of content authors, and finally, tackle inefficient development processes.
How we did it
Design to turn a vision into reality
We began by really thinking outside the box of what a college website “should” be. The institute was looking to showcase their commitment to innovation, diversity and inclusion, as well as exceptional educational experiences. Last Call Media collaborated with the Wentworth team to create their new branding direction and to turn this vision into reality. The Last Call Media design team created a fresh, vibrant new look for wit.edu to capture the attention and excitement of the school’s two key audiences: prospective students and their parents.
After translating existing static graphic designs into UX/UI prototypes with an eye towards accessibility, we introduced the Wentworth team to a new and improved method of designing and site-building by utilizing a design system, so that the site could be built in a systematic way as opposed to every page being conceived of and built individually. This way of building the Wentworth site would set us up to create a great-looking site while having an efficient development phase, and playing to Drupal’s strengths, flexibility and customizability.
A consistent, sitewide visual language
To avoid the need to uniquely design and theme every element on every page, Last Call Media created a maximally efficient workflow for Wentworth. We created a consistent sitewide visual language that becomes more intuitive the more users interact with the site.
We implemented a design system-based strategy for the redesign, defining a number of styles and components that would be reusable throughout the site. It included:
40 styles (for things like colors and text styles),
50 elements (which can range in scope from things like buttons to entire sections of pages),
10 fully-responsive page designs—many of these involving multiple design iterations.
Authoring experience for hundreds of content creators
Within an organization like a college or university with often hundreds of content authors, it’s key to remember that site and content changes will often be coming from multiple people throughout the school, who all have varying levels of experience and comfort working within a CMS. This was absolutely the case for Wentworth, and so we varied the flexibility of each content type based on who would be building them. Content types that would be handled by the more experienced members of Wentworth’s web and marketing teams were allowed maximum flexibility—they can essentially put any component on any page they want, in any order they want. Content types that would be used by a wide array of authors with inconsistent levels of technical expertise offered a more structured layout, in order to minimize complexity and maintain the integrity of the website’s information architecture and UX/UI.
The impact of continuous delivery and maintenance
Over the years, we’ve worked with Wentworth to implement industry best practices in terms of programmatic coding, database architecture, and staged deployment and automated testing workflows. Our first engagement with Wentworth involved completing a large set of outstanding updates, setting up Single-Sign-On with Shibboleth, configuring Apache Solr with multicore for development along with boosted “more like this” search results, and other search enhancements.
Our Core Services team was also able to complete Wentworth’s site migration to Pantheon on a tight timeline of less than a week, prior to the school’s Thanksgiving holiday in 2017. This has led to significant cost savings for the school, and provided a clearer path to empowering their small internal development team; the workflows on the new platform were easier for Wentworth to manage, and they benefited greatly from the multidev environment feature.
Our work with the Institute has spanned everything from regular core and module updates, migrating their site to a new hosting platform, to refactoring user groups, URL structures, to accessibility updates and SEO best practice improvements. We maintain a close working relationship with Wentworth in order to continue offering advice and guidance on how to make the most of Drupal
Through a refreshed online presence, the new wit.edu represents Wentworth’s commitment to creating transformational educational experiences for students, and a culture of innovation and creativity. Wentworth is now able to provide site visitors with a more accurate picture of what Wentworth is really about to help them decide whether they can see themselves or their child succeeding at Wentworth.
Last Call Media is proud to have been Wentworth’s partner in improving user experience, creating a seamless process for making content changes for hundreds of content authors, and modernizing development processes.
Blackboard is a global education technology company whose product offerings differ in various parts of the world, and in different languages. In order to provide relevant information for site visitors in different markets Blackboard’s new Drupal 8 site had to not only provide content in different languages, but also content specific to each visitor’s geographic location. It also needed to be faster and cheaper for Blackboard to spin up sites of varying complexity in new markets.
Goals
The goal of localization for Blackboard’s corporate site was to provide site visitors from around the world with content specific to their region in their region’s language. This means that in addition to displaying content in different languages, we also needed to be able to incorporate regional and dialect-specific (think “color” vs “colour”) versions of content. Also, since not all product offerings are available in every region we needed region-specific navigation as well (to avoid linking to irrelevant content for some users). All of this variation needed to exist between each regional site while allowing some content types to be shared across each region, such as dynamic “resources”, “case studies” and partner content.
Implementation
Location Detection: Not only did we need to provide the ability to display regional content, we also wanted users to be aware of it. In order to do this, we use Acquia’s GeoIP service in order to determine where the user is visiting from. If their country doesn’t match the regional content that they are viewing, we present a modal dialog to show them that we have a section of the site that may be better suited for them. Once they either follow the link or indicate that they are happy where they are we set a cookie so that they don’t continually see the alert. If they leave the section that they have selected, we again alert them but provide the option to stay where they have navigated to.
Regional Sections: In order to provide the regional sections of the site we relied heavily on the “group” module. Each region is a “group” entity, with its own content. We have several “group-level” fields that allow us to define things like language, navigation menus that will appear in each section for each group, region-specific 4xx error pages, and the alias that serves as the beginning of the alias for each page belonging to the group.
Each page node is a part of exactly one group. There may be pages in different groups with similar titles and content, but this model allowed us to have content in the same language and still handle regional colloquialisms, dialects, etc. While the distinct page nodes were distinct for each region, we still had to recognize that there were some types of content had to be reused across regional sections, because creating new educational resource nodes with identical content for each region would not be sustainable. Those content types are allowed to belong to multiple groups. Content listings are built in a way so that they only display content that belongs to the regional section that is currently being viewed.
Multilingual: Possibly the most obvious part of localization is enabling content to be displayed in multiple languages. Drupal’s standard multilingual functionality doesn’t really play nicely with a content model that supports multiple versions (product pages can vary between markets) of content in the same language (think spelling differences between American and British English). In order to accommodate the model Blackboard required, we decided to use Drupal’s language modules, but to leave content translation out of the equation. Instead, we would create different nodes for each language that content was to be displayed in. From the administrative side this approach caused us to lose the “translate” operation for nodes, but in turn gave us a huge amount of flexibility. We were still able to create a site that supports content being entered in 10+ languages (including RTL languages like Arabic), and accommodate localized nuance for each region as well.
Blackboard’s requirements were complex, and caused us to rethink our typical multilingual strategy. Instead of creating a site that supports content in multiple languages, the approach that was taken here grants the internal team at Blackboard to create their new regional sections on their site, taking into account available product offerings as well as language and regional nuance - creating a platform for a site that is not only multilingual, but truly global.
