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By ricardosuna on
In May of 2015, five digital agencies—Propeople, Blink Reaction, Bysted, Chainbizz, and Geekpolis—began working under a unified FFW brand. FFW needed a new website to serve as the main digital property for the 400+ person company. The new website needed to have multilingual and localization features since the agency has a presence in over 10 countries to serve a variety of markets all around the world. With key stakeholders in offices on different continents, FFW needed to design and build a site that could easily and effectively be iterated according to varying feedback from stakeholders in different timezones and countries. With these considerations in mind, FFW decided to build the new FFWagency.com on Drupal 8.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Propeople and Blink Reaction, two large agencies that have merged under the FFW brand, have worked primarily with Drupal in the past and have been long-term supporters of the open-source platform. FFW is an agency that offers a full range of digital services, like insights and analytics, strategy, creative offerings, and technological solutions, and the agency knew Drupal 8 was the most reliable and effective platform to provide a digital property for a global company.
Additionally, FFW wanted to demonstrate the benefits of Drupal 8 to clients and to staff members by implementing a site for themselves. The agency also wanted to work directly with the new platform to ensure our developers were as knowledgeable as possible about Drupal 8’s new features and updated best practices. Drupal 8’s flexibility, stability, multilingual capabilities, and scalability ensured FFW could complete the project in a timely manner and meet the needs of stakeholders around the world.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The new FFW site needed to have the correct tools to facilitate a data-driven marketing approach. The agency wanted the ability to be able to understand the site's visitors—where they are visiting from, what content they are interacting with on the site, etc.—and integrate with FFW's marketing automation system. Drupal 8's improved multilingual functionality and flexible front-end capabilities presented the perfect solution, and ease of integration with 3rd party systems, provided the perfect solution for the project.
FFW designed and developed a new Drupal 8 website in a matter of months. Continuous integration allowed the development team to move rapidly and follow best practices. Throughout the design phase, FFW's UX team employed a prototype-based approach. The design team worked with the designs directly in-browser, using FFW's own prototyping framework, and Drupal 8 - all made by possible by the addition of Twig to Drupal 8. This allowed for the designs to be quickly iterated, and stakeholders around the world were able to submit their input. The result is an intuitive, user-friendly site that displays FFW’s services, case studies, job openings, locations, and much more.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
FFW chose to build its new site in Drupal 8 in order to take advantage of some of the key functionality that is now available as part of the D8 core, including localization and multilingual functionality, improved theming with Twig, and an improved mobile experience for site administrators.
FFW used the Mautic module for integration with the Mautic marketing automation platform, and created a custom theme was built using FFW’s prototyping framework (which leverages Twig).
Community contributions:
FFW is a key maintainer of the Drupal 8 Console project (https://www.drupal.org/project/console), which was used in the build of the new FFWagency.com in order to facilitate the development process. The Mautic Drupal 8 module developed by FFW for use on our site will be contributed back to the community, and has been used in order to demonstrate the process of building a module in Drupal 8 (check out the blog post).
Project team:
Team members:
Alex Spoiala, project manager
Liliana Zbirciog, team lead
Christopher Carlsen, design
Jesus Olivas, lead developer
Troels Nielsen, content contributor
Ricardo Osuna, content contributor
Ray Saltini, content contributor
Gina Montoya, content contributor
Erin Nelson, content contributor
Sectors:
Technology
