CI&T Thoughtfully Fast in Drupal 8

By CI&T, Acquia on 21 December 2017

Ciandt.com (us.ciandt.com) is the primary business website for CI&T in the United States. CI&T is a global digital technology solutions partner—a pioneer in design thinking, lean methodologies and advanced technology. The main goal of this website is to provide relevant business information for clients, prospects, partners, influencers, and potential employees. The site is used to collect new business leads and showcase our thought leadership content.

Visit us.ciandt.com →

Why Drupal was chosen:

This project required easy customization, creation and editing of content.
We chose Drupal because of its CMS framework. It allows for the utilization of community projects like views, paragraphs, bootstraps, and others which makes it more efficient and easy to create pages and websites. CI&T has a long been a Drupal partner and user, with a team of over 300 Drupal experts and having developed and manage the most Drupal sites, it was an easy choice.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

The project timeline to re-launch ciandt.com was ambitious and driven by a major company announcement, the acquisition of strategy and design agency Comrade (comradeagency.com). From the project kickoff until launch, we only had 8 weeks allocated. While CI&T has one of the biggest teams of Drupal developers who work on our client CMS engagements, a challenge was to find a project team (UX Designers, Drupal Developers, Content Strategists, a Scrum Master, a Marketing Director, etc) with the capacity to work on our own company website. The expression “The cobbler’s kids have no shoes” comes to mind. Our project management approach was Agile Scrum including daily stand-ups with the team working in remote locations in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Brazil.

CI&T wanted to build an informational hub where prospective clients and other users
can find out more about the company, and a showcase where it can highlight its recent news and work. The new website needed to be an intuitive and templated structure that allowed the US marketing team to update and manage content without needing development assistance. Integration with the existing marketing stack, like CI&T’s CRM software was also important.

This along with designing an eye-catching, inviting, and user-friendly responsive experience were essential.

With the acquisition of the Comrade agency happening, we took the opportunity to explore a new look and redesign the new website. We developed a highly-visual, yet clean design that translates well throughout the site.

The development team designed templates within Drupal based on the page types to handle various content needs. The templates made it easier for members of the Marketing team to be able to update content with new blogs, fresh news, and other upcoming campaigns or events.

Development focused on different sections per sprint. Even with a distributed team working on the project spanning in different time zones, the Dev team worked closely with the marketing team and content strategy manager (CSM) to QA each deployment to ensure that the templates in Drupal satisfied the need for the site’s different sections and pages. As content was entered in the CMS, restrictions and flexibility were tested and improved as both teams evaluated possible fixes and the Dev team would recommend solutions.

Establishing standards as new sections and page templates were developed which enabled the Dev team to create modules and panels that allowed content editors to manage various content structures and made it easy to arrange layouts which saved time for developers and the creative team.

Technical specifications

Drupal version:

Drupal 8.x

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

Menu Link Attributes: Menu Link Attributes provides a way to edit the attributes of links. This is helpful as we continue to evolve the content of our site and think about future sections for the website.
Views: Views helped because it allowed create and manage content lists across the site.
Link: The link helped because it allows creating a field for links. This way it was easier to add links to on-site and external pages.
YouTube Field: In order to create more visual and engaging pages, having the ability to easily add YouTube videos on pages allows us to do that.
Field Group: Field Group has helped with the organizing fields by groups, making it easier to organize and edit.
Token: Provided a centralized way to manage token creation and replacement throughout the system. It is very useful for our multiple e-mail subject/body templates.
Paragraphs: Paragraphs have proved to be useful in making content edits easier. Our team can use Paragraph to quickly and easily create a simple text block or image to adding tables.
Google Tag Manager: It allowed us to manage the analysis of the site allowing the insertion of tags and systems tracking pages using Google Tag Manager (GTM).
Metatag: Allows for all pages created to have a structured metadata with the flexibility of editing meta titles and descriptions.
Bootstrap: To create a responsive site we look for a powerful front-end framework. Bootstrap made web development easier and faster.