The 1,000+ page website managed by one person

by Richard Walters

A 10-year-old e-learning company’s main priority was focusing on their core business, and as a result, they grew to be an industry leader with over 100M in annual earnings. The company’s website, however, wasn’t the focus of their attention. Several attempts were made through the years to redo both the site’s design and its content, but those projects were abandoned again and again as being too complex to be worth the effort it required. According to Google, the site had well over 7,000 pages in late 2009—all of which were created manually by teams of different employees and contractors from the past decade. The company possessed no inventory of these pages, the site had only ten menu items and the website itself was still optimized for screens and browsers from 2000. Yet, the website was being visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, either looking for support or product information. Internal motivation started to wane, and this is where Mindspace entered the picture.

Our Interactive team was charged with the task of updating the existing website design and content, as well as making it dynamic enough to be easily maintained and changed. After an initial interview and a two month period of research and assessment, Mindspace proposed new graphic design and the creation of a custom CMS (Content Management System) which would allow for ALL content to be editable by the content owners and creators. An inventory of all pages was also delivered, along with a plan for cleaning and migration—a large portion of which would be automated. A five month timeline was proposed, along with a budget range and a video for the home page to present the company’s significant differentiators.

Despite significant unanticipated setbacks like the server being two months delayed, more than 100% turnover on the client site web team and a significantly increased scope, the website was complete ten days early and within the budget range originally projected. The client even asked to have the launch pushed back a week since they didn’t expect how speedy our delivery would be.

Today, the custom CMS allows for complete customization of the entire website. Old pages are being redirected to the new website, and SEO has been incorporated into all pages. Calls to Action are dynamically driven by the page content and there are well over a dozen modules that allow for different content types. Pages or entire sections can be turned on and off and moved or renamed—all while not breaking any existing links. A page inventory is readily available anytime. Multiple versions of content can exist simultaneously, and content owners each have a customized dashboard that they can use to communicate with each other about any content. Last but not least, the site’s content is almost entirely maintained by the company’s web team, which, thanks to Mindspace, is now comprised of one person.

Footnote: Within four months of the website going live, the company was acquired in a friendly acquisition aimed at growing the business.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 11:21 am and is filed under Flash, Interactive, new media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.