Our work
A web platform to power a federated business
- 5 sites from Drupal 7 to 9 in 8 months
- Consistent brand and user experience
- Low-code pattern library providing enhanced marketing agility
- Won Platinum and Gold DotCOMM awards for the Data Hub
How do you run an estate of websites, each with their own audience and conversion strategy, while managing technical debt, brand consistency, common usability and SEO standards?
HERE'S THE FULL STORY
The Situation
Close Brothers is divided into a series of business units, each focused on servicing a set of audiences. Coherence Digital provides an estate of over 20 web applications, all Drupal, all hosted on Acquia Cloud Hosting, addressing each audience and supporting the marketing needs of each unit. Close Asset Finance has a lean marketing team, with strong marketing strategy and an ambitious organic and paid optimisation approach. They manage 5 websites:
- www.closeassetfinance.co.uk
- www.closeassetfinance.de
- www.braemarfinance.co.uk
- www.braemarfinance.ie
- www.closebusinessfinance.com.
This team has all the skills needed for success - strong web analytical and campaign capabilities, content generation and optimisation skills, and data analytical capabilities. Now they needed a web platform that has the sophistication and power to allow them to execute their marketing strategy.
The Challenge
The 5 domains were unique in branding and content approach. Each required constant optimisation to maintain ranking, all needing to reflect a common user experience, brand identity, security and stability standards.
So how does a lean marketing team manage such a broad estate? And when you multiply that across the whole group, what does a multi-site web-estate with a common brand and divergent engagement strategies look like?
Agility is key. But how can marketers be empowered to manage their web properties without constant redevelopment to support common optimisation, message testing and campaign needs, without going off-brand?
Our Solution
Coherence Digital built Close Brothers a master design system - a master Drupal application using Acquia Site Studio to power a common set of base styles, responsive behaviours, typographies, design patterns and interactive elements. These bake-in best practices in accessibility, branding, semantic markup and user experience. This lets the content editor concentrate on messaging safe in the knowledge that what they publish will be rendered to the best standards for user consumption and search visibility.
Acquia Site Studio enabled us to create a flexible design system of re-usable patterns within Drupal. The low-code tool helped us bring each site to market in a fraction of the time taken to deliver a stand-alone native Drupal application. Our solution allowed the marketing team to continue evolving their engagement strategies without costly onward development for core publishing tasks. Drupal provides the security, accessibility and integration features necessary to support our client's needs.
