The online and print magazine, Hemaware, a project of the National Hemophilia Foundation (NHF) was starting to feel and show its age. The NHF asked Cheeky Monkey Media to update not only the platform (Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 migration) but the site look and feel as well. There were a number of issues with the original site that needed to be addressed over the course of this project.
The site was not mobile friendly, it had interstitial ads popping up on every page you went to, and the current platform was a now unsupported version of Drupal 6. In addition to this, there were a number of tagging and taxonomical issues that needed to be fixed as well.
The magazine is sustained by donations and sponsorship ad revenue. CMM needed to find a way to integrate ads better (without interfering with user experience).
With a large amount of helpful content (and more being generated all the time), the site needed to be more readable as well (on both desktop and mobile).
About the project
Using an open and closed card sort, we were able to help identify some areas for improvement in the site architecture, and recommendations for taxonomy and tagging. Once we had the site structure down, we could concentrate on improving the user experience by first creating wireframes to illustrate general layout and functionality, and then move on to more hi-fidelity designs.
With some alternative methods of showing sponsorship ads (and options for more ad formats) Hemaware now has more to offer sponsors and more granular control of placement. In addition, the annoying and SEO hindering interstitial ads were removed.
Migrating the content from the older Drupal 6 site to the new Drupal 8 site was a key component. Not all modules that were installed on the older drupal 6 site existed in drupal 8. To solve this, we found alternative modules as well as custom coding to bridge the gap. Custom scripts were also developed to migrate content that did not have a clear upgrade path to Drupal 8.
Page speed was also a consideration, both for usability and SEO. A combination of core and contributed modules was used to serve responsive images for different device sizes. Utilizing Redis caching and Solr Search helped offload caching and search tables from the Drupal database.
Why Drupal was chosen
To solve Hemaware's problems, we first had to address the Drupal 6 situation (Drupal no longer supports Drupal 6 or older core installations). We all agreed Drupal 8 would be a good fit for Hemaware's needs and content.
Additionally, Hemaware needed a CMS that was focused on publishing content. The Drupal Lightning distribution was used to make content publishing a breeze.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- The lightning distribution was chosen to make content editing and publishing easier, and take advantage of built in media support.
- Double Click For Publishers was used to integrate with the clients existing advertising system.
- Migrate Upgrade was used to help migrate the old version of Drupal 6 to Drupal 8.
- Redis is used for a caching back-end system to offload caching from Drupal Database.
- Search API and Solr was used for a customized search system and to take advantage of faster search with a Solr search back-end.
- The Metatag module was used for SEO and for the client and content editors to be able to set their own Metatags.
- Paragraph was used to give more editing power to editors and create unique layouts.
