Sector(s)

Team Members

Project Team

Appnovation Project Team

John Chisholm
Shan Shan Fu
Myles O’Leary
Raymond Yu
Greg Field
Loren Davidson
Joao Sausen
Yohendry Hurtado
Edward Jong
Afraaz Ali
Darren Louie
Jesse Nicola

Visit the site

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Organizations Involved

TCL (The Creative Life), the third largest TV manufacturer in the world, was rapidly expanding into the American market branded as “America’s fastest-growing TV brand”. The USA division sought to improve visuals and content management of their website, vital to the success of bringing the “creative” vision to life on April 14th.

With the opportunity to build an award-winning Drupal 8 showroom, Appnovation provided a detailed preliminary scope, laying out the assumptions and implementation guidelines, and ensuring the “vision” ready to take shape and, ultimately, get delivered.

About the project

TCL (The Creative Life) is the third largest TV manufacturer in the world, which is currently enjoying a rapid expansion within the always-competitive American market. Such is the growth of this company, TCL has been branded as “America’s fastest-growing TV brand”.

As part of their commitment to their digital presence, the TCL USA division were looking to improve both the aesthetic, and content management elements of their website, which they considered to be of paramount importance to the success of their “creative” vision.

With the opportunity to build an award-winning Drupal 8 showroom, our senior Appnovation Drupal development team set about estimating the preliminary scope, laying out the assumptions and implementation guidelines, and ensuring the “vision” with within our reach.

Project Challenges

The discovery and discussion phase of the project began with a series of exhaustive, meaningful and informative conversations with our client.

During these discussions, we discussed and uncovered the TCL dream, and how they saw the various possibilities that could illuminate the attractiveness of the Creative Life.

One of the challenges that transpired was finding the right answers to their questions, in terms of their digital vision, something that involved a great amount of detail, thought, consideration and investigation. With the constant assistance of the client, and our ability to listen to their preferences and directions, the end result was excellent, a shining exampled of the need for ongoing collaboration.

Ultimately, our goal was to conceptualize, create and deliver a sleek aesthetic showroom, enhanced with high fidelity visual “eye-candy”, designed to afford users a superb user experience in terms of navigation.

Project Results

Naturally, as with every project, the challenges of fiscal consideration and timelines were also up for consideration, as was the decision to use Drupal 8. Thankfully, Appnovation were able to suggest and engineer a solution would deliver affordability, timely project delivery and the best implementation of Drupal 8.

While our team was finalizing the design, we spent time forging a foundation on which to formulate the site architecture. Each and every component that was intended for use, was considered in tandem with the overall structure, the big picture, so to say.

Thanks to our improved timeline, we had the opportunity to polish the website to perfection.

As you read this, the new TCL USA D8 website is officially live!

TCL TRIVIA

TCL USA Redesign was a collaborative effort across multiple fixed teams.

TCL USA Redesign project won the 2017 Q2 New Business Team Award.

TCL’s monster 110-inch 4K TV featured in “Iron Man 3” ensconced in Tony Stark’s living room.

TCL purchased the official naming rights to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

Why Drupal was chosen

As TCL wanted only the very best in terms of their redesign, with high aesthetic specifications and functionality a must, there was no contest. Drupal 8 was the one and only way to go.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Paragraphs

Used heavily for managing the site's content. Allowed us to define reusable content sections that the client could use to build different pages

Pathauto - Automatically generated clean urls

Metatag - Define metatags for SEO for pages

Link Attributes - Add additional attributes such as classes and ids to link fields

Field Group - Used to make the content administration a more manageable interface rather than a single long form

Tablefield - Used for tabular data being displayed. We extended the field type defined by this module to have it use text areas with a WYSIWYG editor.

Entity Clone - Facilitated cloning of nodes (including the paragraphs associated with them) to ease the burden of content entry for the client

Google Analytics - To add GA tracking to the site

Redirect - For putting in client managed redirects for their old URLs

Search API - For building and searching content within the site

Config Split - Allowed us to define separate configurations for production vs development environments

IMCE - Allows for file uploads within a WYSIWYG enable text field

Recreate Block Content

-Created for this project and distributed to the community. Solves an issue with block placement being exportable configuration while custom blocks are content.