Creating an Engaging Editorial Experience with Reusable Components for The Crohn's & Colitis Foundation

Requirements

The Foundation wanted to: 

• Migrate from its previous legacy CMS to Drupal, with existing content unaltered (both structured and unstructured)
• Enable centralized creation and collaboration of digital workflow to efficiently manage their digital assets

Challenges

The existing CMS was a non-scalable platform posing challenges in the following areas -

• Slower turnaround time to create (campaign) landing pages with dependence on developers
• Lack of role-based access to track website changes by stakeholders 
• Lack of visibility to remove duplicate content 
• Lack of a non-production environment restricted the discovery of vulnerabilities in the system
• Branding inconsistencies due to individual microsites management

The Solution

Drupal was identified as a solution primarily for its capacity to scale with the business over time, combined with simple but powerful content management.  

The potential to integrate multiple microsites with one centralized system ensured that the client doesn’t end up with a fragmented tech stack split across multiple platforms that could become complex and expensive to maintain. 

By adhering to its agile methodologies, Srijan helped the foundation reduce development time and cost. 

Overall approach

• Website management & development-

Acquia BLT ensured faster testing, building, and launching of the platform. SonarQube addressed issues like potential bugs, code duplications, and bad distribution of complexity. Acquia Cloud also played a role in expediting time-to-market & scaling deployments based on their needs.

• Content & SEO

Drupal capabilities helped editors create landing pages on the go & generate content faster. Google schema tags were added to improve search experiences, visibility, and ranking on the search engines. 

• Website performance 

Varnish & Cloudflare ensured faster response times & thus low-latency delivery. ELK also supported efficient resource monitoring & issue resolution.

Tech Stack

Acquia BLT, Acquia SOLR, Acquia Cloud, Sonarqube, Drupal modules- Varnish, Cloudflare, ELK

Business Benefits

• Efficient generation of high-quality content across microsites
• Easier website maintenance with clean, simple, and easy-to-read code
• Better content recommendations increased engagement & improved users’ digital experiences
• Improved website ranking on search engines
• Pages per session for one of the microsites doubled & bounce rated reduced to 24% YOY
• Reduced the cost of maintenance 
• Enhanced website scaling even if the number of projects increases drastically