Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By Last Call Media on
Our new LCM for 2017
In 2013, Drupal 8 was still very incomplete and unstable. We were very excited about where it was heading and were involved in its development as much as possible. As it was nearly time for a site refresh for our company site, we thought doing it in Drupal 8 would be a good way to put the software through some real world usage, and fix the bugs along the way. We did it. While our then-new 2013 Drupal 8 site had information about us and our work, it was primarily proof of we could do with the early Alpha versions of the CMS at that time.
We wanted to improve how we tell our story so our site visitors could have a better sense of who we are. We wanted to increase engagement to help our visitors learn about our work and what we can do for them. We wanted to give our visitors an authentic transparent view into all that LCM is, so they can take that awareness and make the best possible decision for themselves.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal 8 was officially released in 2015 and by 2016 we had completed several complex Drupal 8 projects. It was getting to be about that time. Our website was still performing, serving what we had set out for it to do back in 2013. However, a shining example of Drupal 8 from 3 years ago was not all we needed to be communicating in the coming year. We had evolved, grown, and done a lot of cool projects with a lot of cool people. Technologies and best practices had changed and evolved too, and we had been right there with them. There was so much more we were aware of and ideas were forming in everyone’s minds about how we needed our website to better represent us and communicate for us.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Authenticity, Card Sorting, Personas, Site Map
We wanted this new site to represent us and communicate who we are. This takes learning each other and finding the alignment and attunement needed to agree even on first steps, like a site map. Over the years, we’ve developed a pretty successful Card Sorting workshop as an excellent attunement exercise for this exact need. Additionally, I thought it would be fun. We sent around a Google poll asking the team what they think LCM does and what they thought we should do more of. From these answers, we formed the base card set for use in the exercise. We took this set, with blanks for any new cards needing to be created, and did the company wide exercise of sorting, discussing, creating, and grouping cards. We even discarded some.
Some of the things from the Card Sorting exercise stood out and informed major changes to our site. Our About section was a priority and had a lot of cards ordered within it. We really wanted people to know who we were. Blogs were deprioritized out of the main navigation and made more contextual. Our services were agreed to be a priority to communicate. Finally, a focus on our work with the client as a focal point emerged as a strong theme.
A lot of the cards that fell into an About section had to do with our commitment to Agility, its values, and its focus on collaboration and communication. While considering who we understood our site user personas to be and brainstorming what new content would be needed for this direction, a final draft site map came together with new top level items. “What we do” was to be a “Work/Portfolio” section to show our work by first focusing on each client, with our Services explained contextually. “How we work” was to be a “Process” section to talk a little about how we achieve such work for our clients. This covered many of the cards from the exercise’s About section. “Who we are” covered the rest of that section’s cards and was to be our more traditional “About us” section. And, then of course, “Contact us.”
General strategy, content, and content modeling for each aspect proceeded, informed by this initial discovery work.
Content and Functionality
For the “What we do” section, we wanted to put our Clients first to represent their importance to us. So, the homepage was to be the “What we do” section, answering that question for people immediately. A visitor could read more on each featured client and see different work examples we had done for them. From there they could view more clients or contact us.
Underneath the hood, we built ourselves a business tool with every project, large or small we had ever done, catalogued and referenced with each project’s services and responsible team leads. These projects could be filtered and featured on their own dynamic Service/Industry Landing page, or on custom Targeted/Personalized Landing Pages, as well as on their relevant Client Pages.
Due to the content model, all of this content flowed into other related clients and projects to browse, with the option to contact us always available. If visitors were looking for more info, they could go to the menu and read about How we work, or go even further to read about Who we are.
However, as the designs, content, and the site itself was coming together and we were using it, something felt off. It didn’t flow.
See how we solved it. Read the full story here.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
The site primarily leverages modules provided out of the box by Drupal 8.
We organized the sites features using the Features module. Metatags, including Open Graph and Twitter Cards are handled by the Metatags module. Communication from the site visitors to the stakeholders is handled by provided core modules, Contact Block, Swift Mailer and Honeypot.
Organizations involved:
Project team:
Last Call Media is a full-service creative agency developing solutions for partners online and off through innovative strategy, branding, print, and digital design. Last Call Media enjoys work with purpose– building engaging solutions that assist and support organizations working to improve their communities.
Sectors:
Enterprise
Media
Small business
Startups
Technology
