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Organizations Involved

Taylor Guitars is a reputable manufacturer that specializes in crafting exceptional acoustic and electric guitars. Their product line includes a diverse range of guitar models and accessories, such as cases, picks, and straps. With the support of CourtAvenue, Taylor has successfully expedited their online transformation and has been able to offer their customers the convenience of purchasing their products directly from their website.

CourtAvenue's with Taylor Guitars involves taking a highly modified Drupal 7 site, migrating it to a more standardized Drupal 9 build following Drupal Site building and module development best practices, along with the launch of several new commerce initiatives. 

CourtAvenue upgraded the site to Drupal 9 in 2022. Drupal was easy to use for staff who is already familiar. The Taylor team is very self service oriented and needed a platform that they could run without having technical or development knowledge and have the ability to rapidly construct page variations based on a library of components. Taylor went live selling guitars direct-to-consumer from the website in 2023. 

CourtAvenue Involvement:

  • Redesigned and developed the templates for PDPs, Series pages, and the existing direct-to-consumer Accessories section of the website. 

  • Redesigned and developed the navigation, header, and footer.

  • Made optimizations to focus on commerce best practices and cater to a shopping mindset for the target audience, while also continuing to incorporate the rich educational content created by the Taylor Guitars team.

  • Partnered with several third parties to coordinate integrations for a successful DTC launch.

About the project

Taylor needed a platform that is:

  • Highly customizable to meet specific needs for page layout and content control.

  • A hub for customer data from registrations to commerce activity.

  • Seamlessly integrated with partners that drive commerce, product locators, dealer networks and search.

  • High performing with both search and speed.

With shifts in the digital landscape, Taylor Guitars wanted to accelerate their online presence and expand their commerce efforts by selling guitars and accessories directly to consumers from their website. They wanted to follow eCommerce best practices to provide an intuitive user experience on all devices, and get users to PDPs in the most efficient way possible. 

To accomplish this, Taylor Guitars wanted to build upon the existing foundation (D7) and make the necessary updates to optimize the experience to set the stage for commerce. 

Challenges:

  • Frequent changes in business requirements leading up to launch.

  • Tight timeline for project completion.

  • Complex coordination required among multiple agencies and vendors involved in the project.

  • Complex specs & product catalog.
     

CourtAvenue Approach:

  • Create a best-in-class shopping experience and transition their site to be a more consumer-facing touchpoint by taking inspiration from inside and outside of the music industry. 

  • Optimize the current flow of product information by redesigning both the category pages and product pages. 

  • Incorporate commerce best practices to make a more intuitive shopping experience for users, improving usability and engagement.

  • Migrate to a supported platform as Drupal 7 was nearing EOL.

  • Re-architect page assembly using the latest Drupal feature of layouts.

  • Launch a platform ideal for e-commerce of guitars and accessories.

  • Do all of this in a cost effective and rapid process.

A streamlined online shopping experience starts with intuitive product pages and a cohesive digital presence. A new Drupal 9 implementation was created that used best practices for content layout that was both highly customizable and usable by non-coding resources. The Drupal 7 content was migrated along with the original styling of the site, while several features were added to better display product features, series, and product detail pages along with improving both site speed and search performance.

CourtAvenue Solution:

  • Define a library of 30 different components using custom content blocks.

  • Migrate existing content from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 with a combination of custom processes and the Drupal migration framework.

  • Re-create all custom module functionality for guitar registration.

  • Build new modular product detail pages for accessories and guitars for the purpose of adding add to cart functionality.

  • Integrate third party services for commerce, reviews, Q&A, product locator and search.

  • Redesign and implement the navigation, header, and footer.

Drawing on inspirations from Taylor Guitar’s rich history in the music industry, we outlined a roadmap to success that ended with a best-in-class shopping experience for the customer. 

The Results:

  • Fewer maintenance issues leading to the ability to focus on large projects like a rebuild of the accessories section and launch of sitewide commerce capabilities.

  • Better search performance.

  • Easier to maintain code build on D9’s architecture.

  • Updated support and security due to using the latest Drupal release with a clear update path.

  • Exceeded online guitar sales goals within first month of launch.

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal is an exceptional enterprise-level Content Management System that boasts a wide range of advanced features, despite being open-source and freely available. This makes it an attractive platform for businesses seeking a feature-rich solution that can accommodate complex content models and layouts, as well as advanced features such as versioning and workflows. Additionally, Drupal's extensibility allows skilled developers to easily augment its functionality using the platform's APIs and extension framework.

For Taylor Guitars, whose client requires the ability to manage their content themselves, Drupal's flexible and customizable functionality is especially advantageous. With Drupal, Taylor Guitars can easily build content management tools that allow non-technical resources to create and modify pages, all while providing a seamless and intuitive user experience.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Taylor Guitars is built using the latest version of Drupal 9. Built on top of Composer, it is set up for easy updating of the codebase with all custom development in custom modules and a custom theme, using best practices for both site building and Drupal development. The site is hosted on the Pantheon platform and utilizes Pantheon’s secure integration for sharing data with outside systems.