Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Amy Fink - project manager
Spela Grasic - marketing and content
Tamara Robinson - design
Chris Arlidge - design and review
Jordan Meier - testing and bug fixes
The Client
Many years ago, ok not that many, Chris Hathaway discovered a problem: he needed an easy way to get applicable and relevant location data related to his work and studies in data extraction. Since no such solution existed at the time, Chris did the only thing an entrepreneur can do. He championed a solution — AggData.
Today, AggData extracts, updates and maintains data for over 4,500 businesses and organizations, including industry leaders like McKinsey & Company, Simon Malls, and Petco, which rely on AggData’s continually expanding library of data to help them with planning, development, and marketing strategies.
AggData’s Goals and Objectives
At Cheeky Monkey Media, we’ve been working with AggData since 2013, when we were hired to:
- Migrate their website from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7
- Design a new logo
- Redesign the website to make it easy to navigate and give it a fresh, clean look
Following this, we helped AggData finish a Drupal Commerce integration and then continued to maintain and customize the website and commerce functioning for the next 2 years.
We had such a blast working together on the initial site build and collaborating in the years that followed, and AggData was so happy with the results, that they reached out to us when they were ready for a website redesign in early 2016.
While AggData wasn’t quite ready to move to Drupal 8, they had some specific objectives in mind for the redesign:
- Empower the site to serve as a more advanced marketing tool by improving pathways to conversion, making better use of SEO, as well as streamlining, cleaning, and enhancing the look and feel of the site.
- To take advantage of new technology and improve responsiveness by re-theming and incorporating small functionality updates.
- Making use of the redesign to ensure it worked seamlessly on mobile
Since we were going to be making some changes to the site’s visual identity, we had to make sure to keep AggData’s brand in mind:
- The new visual identity had to correspond with the company's goals and culture.
- The identity had to convey a more inspiring and memorable brand essence that AggData could leverage for future growth.
Most importantly, we needed to keep the big picture in sight at all times. Ultimately, the user experience needed to be fine tuned to make it easier for clients to find and buy AggData products.
About the project
Goals
See overview above
The Results
Following the launch of AggData’s newly redesigned website:
- Website traffic increased by 29%*
- Bounce rates on selling pages decreased by 25%*
- Total number of website downloads increased by 73%.*
It’s also worth noting, since we were looking at improving the website’s ability to respond to different screen sizes, that total mobile and tablet downloads from the website increased by a whopping 183%*!
*When compared to the same time period the year before the new website launched.
Like AggData, we’re thrilled with these results!
The Process
Enhancing a brand’s visual identity and redesigning their website is not a small task. Moreover, since AggData was moving to a two-site system — the main site and the Premium site — we needed to make sure that the UX was consistent across both. In addition, we wanted to make sure that we implemented the tools — Google Analytics and A/B testing — AggData would need to further optimize and improve their site as they moved further.
We started by defining AggData’s main audiences and relevant keywords. Then, we dug deep into AggData’s mission and vision statements to make sure we had a solid grasp of the tone and style that best represented AggData’s brand identity.
During this time, we also mapped out the pathways that website visitors used when browsing the site to help inform the site’s information architecture and wireframes and ensure content and information were organized for easy accessibility and an optimal user experience.
Once this was complete, we created an appealing visual design and developed clear and engaging website copy.
Project Timeline and Milestones
The project took about 4 months to complete. We began with a kick-off meeting in mid-February. At this point, we conducted a business analysis, identified goals, and began working on the information architecture and wireframes. By the end of March, the wireframes were ready for presentation and we moved on to the design phase.
The homepage design was presented at the beginning of April and we continued to work on the rest of the design components. The designs included desktop and mobile versions of the homepage; the style guide, with additional special elements from the site; the products page, and the product details page. During this time, we also worked on the content.
By mid-June, we were ready to launch the site.
The Challenges and How We Resolved Them
Integrating with Insightly:
We had never integrated with Insightly before, and the contributed module available didn’t get us all of the functionality our client wanted. So, we ended up customizing what that module did, and after working with the client on the requirements, we finally got something workable for them.
The Table Style look that was dominant on the old version of the desktop site:
The old site and the new theme both favored the table-like style look. While this was O.K for desktop, it definitely would not work for mobile or tablet sized screens. So, we did some research to find alternatives that might work. Although we found a lot of different options, we ultimately went with a pretty simple jquery option that moved some dom content around dynamically so it stacked well.
Why Drupal was chosen
Aggdata’s founder understood that Drupal is an incredibly flexible and powerful CMS before he started working with Cheeky Monkey. His experiences with Drupal since have only solidified this initial belief, so it makes sense that both the original and redesigned versions of the AggData website were created on Drupal.
To begin with, Drupal’s modularity helps us ensure that AggData received increased functionality piece by piece. Then, the large Drupal community, which is continuously developing great products, allowed Cheeky Monkey to meet most of AggData’s needs right out of the box. In addition, Drupal’s overridability has really helped us reach the finish line and really customize the website experience for AggData.
From special discount rules that can easily be adjusted by staff to unique bundled products to a RESTful interface for AggData’s internal business process to interact with, we have built a lot of pieces into the site that would have been much harder to incorporate had we not used Drupal.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
For this particular redesign project, we incorporated a few new technical pieces into the project along with the new responsive theme:
The paragraphs module, helped us create a better page management experience for the homepage and a few other special pages.
We also incorporated structured product data as well as google analytics event tracking to assist in the owner’s new focus on better SEO reporting and optimization.
Aggdata had also decided to start using an external CRM called Insightly, so we modified a number of lead forms to integrate with this service using an api so the leads could be pushed over on submission.
We also created a custom, specialized ‘Right Aggdata’ form using Drupal’s core form api that matches users to the product that best fits their needs. It works as follows: First, users are prompted to answer a few multiple choice questions. Once users fill out their answers, the form runs through a series of algorithms and figures out which product will best fit that user’s needs. These results are then shown to the user, who is then prompted to either start browsing those products or to fill out a contact form that sends their basic information and questionnaire answers to Insightly so that sales representatives could get back to qualified leads in a timely manner.
As for the new theme itself, we created a custom theme that used the Zurb Foundation Drupal theme as it’s parent theme. This helped us get tons of responsive structure and tools out of the box so we could focus on matching our designer’s vision. We added a bit of responsive jquery table magic to make the tables stack up well when going to mobile and flew from there.
