Client Story
Candi
Website Build + Umbraco CMS Integration
Candi, leaders in retail and FMCG digital marketing and ecommerce, needed to update their website so that it reflected the growth of their business and all the great work they had been doing for their clients. They also wanted to move administration of the site over to the Umbraco content management system (CMS), which would enable them to update themselves their website's content quickly and easily.
But, as is often the way for growing businesses, with strong demand for their services they needed to prioritise client work, leaving them little time to do their own site. As a result, they decided to outsource the build of the website.
Candi's business is about helping consumer sector businesses get the most from technology, creating a tangible link between digital investment and a business' marketing and sales strategy. As such, they have the highest presentation standards, so in looking for a development partner for their site, they wanted a web development agency that could get the most out of Umbraco and execute their ideas and design plans with skill and sensitivity.
To start the project, Candi provided us with a very detailed plan of the navigation, functionality and visual look they wanted from their new website.
In building the website's 'front-end' (the part of the website which visitors see and interact with), our developers coded the style-sheets to match Candi's designs and functional requirements.
We also integrated the Candi Player, a showcase carousel shown below, which Candi had developed themselves and was to be included on the website:
In terms of integrating Umbraco, we presented Candi with a couple of options. As one of a select bunch of Gold Partner Umbraco UK development agencies, we're a big fan of Umbraco. That's in part due to the fact that it can be tailored and adapted to meet specific client needs.
Candi chose the Umbraco integration option that best reflected how they wanted to place and use content on the site, whilst still facilitating the efficient and easy updating of the website by their staff.
How did we do this? Well, traditionally, in structuring a CMS, folders represent pages of the website; when people want to update a certain page of the website, they just go to a certain folder in the CMS. In Candi's case, such a process was more complicated because content on one page was often included on other pages. As a result, changing one page would normally mean being aware of the linkages to other sections and making sure they were also updated for the new content.
With a normal Umbraco configuration, repeating such a process everytime the website needed updating would take time and introduce the risk of error. To solve this and make Umbraco really work for Candi, we configured Umbraco so that a user updating a piece of content would only have to do it once - with that change reflected automatically in other linked areas of the site.
This was achieved through creating a separate content hierarchy within Umbraco. We built a new content repository with its own set of business rules which determined how content changed in one place would be reflected in other areas of the site that were linked or shared content. This saves the person updating a piece of content from having to then update the same thing in other places around the site, thereby preserving consistency of navigation and avoiding inconsistencies.
