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CreativeGround is a free online directory of profiles for cultural nonprofits like libraries and theaters, creative businesses like recording studios and design agencies, and artists of all disciplines. They came to LCM looking to escape a pattern that many organizations find themselves in: the design, creation, hosting, and support of their website had been handed off multiple times between different agencies, and some things had been lost in a long game of telephone; they were in a support contract, but didn’t feel supported; they knew they needed to make some big changes to their site, but needed guidance on where to start. They needed a partner that would be both capable and transparent, and help them take their site to the next level.

Understandably, CreativeGround was wary of jumping into another agreement with yet another dev shop, so we started off slow. Through concise communication, thorough support, routine site updates, and honest recommendations over the course of several months, LCM was able to show CreativeGround that it’s possible to have an expert team of developers on their side, with all of their best interests in mind. 
 

We developed and implemented an upgrade and migration path for the site with 85 modules, including 35 custom modules, to bring the site to a fully functioning Drupal 7 build. The upgrade was fully developed and its deployment was seamless. The Rainforest Alliance site went from Drupal 6 to 7 with zero downtime.

A new sitemap was devised, consisting of both categorization pages as well as merchant pages. Each page of the site has the ability to “feature” certain coupons, which are chosen automatically or overridden by an administrator. We leveraged Drupal to aggregate new coupons, categorizing and qualifying them automatically, as well as weeding out any duplicates as they come in. Due to the high volume of content on every page, we implemented a performance plan that met stringent testing requirements.

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.

In the discovery phase, we reviewed the marketplace to find the most appropriate CDN for the State’s use case, balancing security, performance, and cost considerations. Ultimately, Cloudflare was selected as the best fit because of its extensive firewall and DDOS protections, and granular cache control using “Cache Tags,” which have the potential to boost performance for the constituents and reduce the risk of site instability.  

The first, and perhaps most critical concern we addressed in the course of this project was that the CDN needed to be resilient, serving pages even if the site itself was not functioning properly. For example, the development team does code releases periodically that take the backend of the site completely offline, but constituents still need to be able to access content during this time. To meet this requirement, we adjusted the site’s caching headers to include directives to serve cached responses in the event of an error response received from the origin.  As a result, constituents are able to access the majority of Mass.gov, even if a catastrophic event takes the web servers completely offline.

As a government website, Mass.gov is always at risk of attack from malicious actors. To mitigate this risk, Last Call Media undertook extensive configuration and testing of Cloudflare’s various security features, including the Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDOS protections, and custom firewall rules. We had a few hiccups along the way with configuring the security features (at one point, content authors were receiving CAPTCHA verifications when submitting their changes), but were ultimately able to work through these issues to dial in the right balance of security and ease-of-use.

Next, we implemented Cloudflare’s brand new “Workers” feature, which gives granular control over CDN functionality using a javascript “service worker.” The Worker we wrote for this project handles more than 6 million requests a day, and gives the Commonwealth the ability to test and deploy CDN level changes to development, staging, and production environments independently, making it much faster and safer to verify and release changes. The worker implementation benefits the Commonwealth giving them flexibility for the future, while also reducing cost over the previous CDN.

These workers were also integral to the success of this migration beyond what we had initially imagined. During the testing and release phases of the project, they gave us a mechanism for fixing changes that was reviewable and testable. Having a well-defined review and deployment process improved the team’s visibility into what changes were being made, and let us avoid silly mistakes. Overall, we felt the development team’s velocity was greatly improved by using this workflow.

Surfacing Blackboard’s value proposition in the main navigation

The largest opportunity with the new global marketing platform was shifting how Blackboard connected with its prospective customers.

Originally, a prospective customer’s journey would begin with selecting their industry to dive deeper into a plethora of information about the different products and services. This experience was informative, but it didn’t make it clear that Blackboard’s competitive edge is not in any one individual product but rather in the interconnectedness of their various products, and how they come together to build a dynamic educational ecosystem, regardless of a customer’s industry. We worked with Blackboard to transition from an industry-focused navigation, originally:

To journeys that surface Blackboard’s value streams first: Teaching & Learning, Community Engagement, and Consulting Services. 

Given the importance of Blackboard.com as a marketing tool to drive revenue, we knew we needed to test our efforts in order to identify any usability issues before the site went live. To do this, we conducted in-person user testing at Blackboard’s annual user convention, BbWorld. We gained valuable insight that informed the final structure of the site navigation. Having positive and constructive real-world user feedback was essential in gaining stakeholder buy-in on this new approach. 

Now, Blackboard.com with its revised primary navigation helps connect prospective customers to the different ways Blackboard provides value to its customers. 

Empowering global marketers through a consistent UX 

Prior to the new platform, one of the major challenges Blackboard’s marketers had with the former Tridion content management system was efficiency. In the past, every page needed to be built manually by Blackboard’s internal web team. Marketers used to submit a form to the web team. Often faced with a backlog several weeks long, the web team created it from scratch as soon as possible. A draft page would be created, sent back to the marketer, and any edits would be returned in a document. This could take several days at best to release a new page or changes to an existing page. 

Blackboard marketers can now add and edit content easily while remaining on brand and demonstrating Blackboard’s impact around the globe.

After understanding this process, the different types of content needed and ways that content can be presented to support the new user journeys, we delivered a collection of over a dozen flexible components. Now marketers worldwide are able to create and edit pages on their own, reducing time to market and costs, and the web team is able to focus on other higher value-creating activities. 

Powered by a modern CMS, Drupal 8  

Blackboard needed an enterprise-grade CMS that was capable of scaling to meet their increasing marketing needs while also remaining easy for their content authors to manage. Drupal was a great choice for Blackboard as it enabled them to respond and make content and code-level changes quickly, including introducing new functionality.

The next iteration of the Blackboard brand, supported by a pattern library

The new platform provided an opportunity to rethink how Blackboard uses space and colors so their digital properties are more consistent in look, feel, and structure to their products. 

Blackboard started using color more sparingly and with greater purpose, and the new platform better utilizes white space and reserves color to truly highlight the content Blackboard wants to bring front and center. Subtle variations in the “Call-to-Action” button styles were added to make it clearer to the site visitor what the next step is. With the new platform, Blackboard has removed many of the bright yellow buttons and softened their approach and introduced a few more “friendlier” color options to their web palette. The outcome here is that Blackboard.com, the flagship marketing platform looks and feels consistent with Blackboard’s products and services. 

A globally consistent brand experience with localized messaging   

As a global company, Blackboard’s marketing team needs to be able to quickly position their products and services to customers in those markets directly, in their language. Further, Blackboard’s marketing and content strategy varies per market and therefore often by language. Simply translating pages into different languages was not sufficient given it’s often the case that not all products and services are available in all markets, and even when they are they are often positioned differently. A product may be marketed differently in Spain and in Germany while also not being available in Australia, for example, which means we needed a different approach to translation that supported localization. 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. 

To support this, we built a Global Site feature in the new Blackboard.com that allows the Blackboard marketing team to spin up and manage new sites in different languages quickly without the need to engage development. At launch, this included close to two dozen sites in around 14 different languages.

We extended Drupal 8 core’s translate functionality to support the variations in language between American English and Queen’s English and Latin American and Castilian Spanish while maintaining flexibility so that content could also be localized for different regions. 

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, we built a localization platform that takes into account available product offerings as well as language and regional nuance - creating a platform for an organization that is not only multilingual but truly global.

A commitment to web accessibility 

Blackboard and Last Call Media share a commitment to ensuring what we create is fully accessible to all audiences, regardless of ability. To that end, we had accessibility needs in mind from the very beginning. Our cross-functional approach to product development meant that we were able to validate early on that our work would meet WCAG 2.1 minimums, and by engaging users of assistive technology to assist with testing as development progressed, we knew that the release would also be truly usable on day one. 

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

A key component of the web presence for Columbia Medical School is their faculty profiles. In keeping with their tripartite mission of teaching, research, and clinical work, the University displays two distinctly different types of profiles. Department web site profiles focus on the individual’s scholarly work and administrative positions. The ColumbiaDoctors website displays information about the physician’s clinical work including specialties, practice locations, and insurance. It is also just as important for new medical professionals to store and access their profile information in one place as it is for the departments and practices they are a part of. 

Maintaining a complex system with many data feeds and manual verification of information was becoming a burden for the University’s support staff, and the complexity of the process to create or update a profile was vexing to faculty and their support staff. Columbia University Medical Center looked to LCM to help them find a new solution. There was a preference for moving to an existing solution available in the marketplace rather than building a new custom solution. 

We embarked on an intensive information gathering phase, to better understand the existing technology, data inputs and outputs, and nature of the support queue. Through preparing user stories, we worked with the University to identify stakeholders groups, and we conducted detailed interviews with individuals in each group to understand their pain points within the existing system.

Finally, we conducted extensive research to identify potential solutions. We identified a number of peer institutions and investigated the faculty and physician profiles, and - to the extent possible - the technologies and workflows employed to create them. We contacted a number of vendors to gather more detailed information and winnowed the list of candidates to those that presented the best possible fit. We summarized our findings recommendations in our final meeting with the team.

By working closely with the team and developing a strong rapport with them, as well as the stakeholders, we were able to gain a clear understanding of their goals and deliver actionable recommendations 
 

Our first step in initiating the migration was to investigate what we were dealing with. At the time, mass.gov had around 600,000 revisions with a moderation state that needed to be migrated from Workbench Moderation to Content Moderation. We started off by digging into Content Moderation’s code to fully understand the complexities and layers of the switch. We found the systems to be very different and with no pre-designed migration path, we deduced that we needed to create a handmade migration path from scratch, outside of a standard Drupal 8 migration. Once the initial configuration of this path was set up, the process was just to keep building the migration through trial and error and figuring out the fastest plan of action.

We knew that switching from Workbench Moderation to the new core module, Content Moderation meant the mass.gov site and its authors would benefit. For a government site, security is always a concern and therefore a top priority. When working with a core module, it is actively supported for security and for any updates that core has as opposed to still running on a contributed module. 

After we felt sound on the coding portion of the switch, we wanted to make sure we were in alignment about expected workflows, transitions, non-transitions, and revision states. We started with around 20 transitions in Workbench Moderation that we were able to consolidate to 5 transitions in Content Moderation for a more optimized workflow. 

We also worked on rebuilding some views such as the “all content view” and mass.gov’s specific dashboard called, “MyContent Block”, which contains all the content the logged in author is watching. 

After a successful switch, mass.gov users are leveraging Content Moderation to moderate content. We are implementing a patch to Content Moderation for the view for “filter by moderation state”. This filter was missing some indices that would cause MySQL to incorrectly do a full table scan instead of an indexed scan of content that caused a lot of performance issues. We ended up writing a patch to include the missing indices that would bring down the query load time on the “MyContent Block” view from 15,000 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds. We plan for this patch to be made available for other sites experiencing the same issue with a lot of content like Mass.gov does.