The brief
With a growth strategy powered by acquisitions, and business already operating on a global scale, it almost goes without saying, that The Access Group has an epic digital footprint. And with that, comes an epic scale of work to keep all that digital collateral up to date and in check.
So, what if we could help The Access Group eliminate repetitive tasks, increase their digital teams’ efficiency, improve the visibility of workstreams and ultimately save them valuable time?
What if we could ELEVATE their ways of working...
This is project Elevate. The creation of one unified code base, developed to make deploying and rolling out future updates easier, quicker, and more secure.
What we did
It all started with a unified library. In here we created a suite of components, these are the digital building blocks of The Access Group’s user interfaces. It included components like banner blocks, buttons, full width content blocks, gallery blocks – anything and everything they needed to create digital content.
Then we designed a collection of “themes”, each one unique to brands and websites within The Access Group. The themes defined things like the brand colours, logos, fonts and UI treatments needed to deliver the right brand identity for that product.
These themes could be applied to the components in the library and a beautifully branded, fully tried and tested, ready to go block is created.
Et voila, hey presto, ta dah!
Taking five steps forward and no steps backward, updating Umbraco V8 to V13!
Working alongside fellow Umbraco experts Moriyama as part of a multi-agency team, they made the decision to take the group site in The Access Group’s digital portfolio and use this as the foundation for the unified code base, to kick start the project.
Working on Umbraco 8 initially, we knew we’d need to factor in upgrading from Umbraco 8 to the latest version with long term support – Umbraco 13. This was a multi-step process that started with an upgrade from V8 to V10 and then from V10 to V13, with an all-important data migration phase too.
To do this, we wrote a bespoke migration engine. This successfully mapped and converted the properties outside the unified code base, to the properties inside the unified code base. To reduce bloat and redundant code, the migration engine was developed to ignore pages in draft mode and redundant blocks, so only what was needed, got migrated.
A migration engine that keeps driving forward
Built as a flexible system, new transformations and configurations can be added to the migration engine as needed, ensuring it can grow and adapt alongside
Thanks to the migration engine, content entry has been transformed into content refinement and time lost on content freezes to support deployments has also been reduced.
The Access Group no longer need to spend hours on manual content entry every time a website is moved into the unified code base. Instead, the content is populated through our tried and tested conversion method, and all that’s needed is content refinement to make sure everything’s the best it can be, empowering The Access Group to do more of what’s important.
From a traditional Windows server to a modern Microsoft Azure CI/CD approach
To elevate The Access Group’s ways of working even further, a more modern approach to deployments was introduced, moving from a typical windows server set up, to a multi-environment approach with continuous integration. This change has reduced the manual development time needed to run deployments, speeding up the time to go live. Leveraging multiple environments has also improved the stability of deployments, whether that’s a change request, a bug fix or a new release, as dependencies, causes and effects are easier to spot, and testing has been increased.
I talked through Project Elevate, the rationale and the pay-off with the Extended Marketing Leadership team and the feedback was excellent. Our CMO was fully supportive of the project describing it as a game changer by future proofing our web platform with a shared code base and improving our time to market for digital commercial drivers across our whole website real estate. That is a testament to the hard-work of this team and shows all the effort has been worthwhile. So please take this thanks from me as we start to build on Elevate with all the exciting optimisations and updates we have planned to improve the customer journeys and funnel optimisations!
Pete Hemmett
Head of Web Development & Operations
