Business Challenge

Our client’s website is the most comprehensive commercial website offered by any major broadcaster in the world, with over 85m page impressions and 8m unique visitors per month.

A planned re-launch of all public web properties gave the organisation the opportunity to redevelop their  daytime Food website, cleaning up a poorly structured legacy database and providing upgraded support for video content. They approached us to provide build support, optimise the database for search, and integrate it with a new content management system. They contacted Tobias & Tobias because they needed the work completed in record time; and could not afford errors ahead of a high-profile, public launch.

Solution

Given the time frame, we started by helping the client to prioritise the issues. While analysing and restructuring the data set, we also led other technical partners in the exploration of different solutions to the key challenge: making it easy to manage content, and making the content searchable.

Results

We designed and developed a custom module, enabling the client to manage content easily; and enabling users to search for content in a brand new way, adding meaning to the experience. The technology solution includes a solid, stable back-end which supports a slick user experience for content managers and customers alike. The architecture was based on Drupal, MySQL and Solr.

During development, our team of technologists worked as a hub – a technical intermediary – for the client and its vendors. In addition to delivering the technical solution, our developers introduced design principles to the technical delivery process, adding significant value and exceeding the client’s expectations.