Website compression and 3rd-party platform integration

Company Profile

The Society of Leaders and Chief Executives (Solace) is the UK’s leading membership network for the public sector and local government professionals. They currently represent over 1600 members across the UK and have regional branches across the country, which play host to a number of events such as regional development days, skills days and networking opportunities.

3

Websites amalgamated into one

4

SaaS apps custom integrated into the website

4

Year ongoing business relationship

The Problem

The initial set of challenges was around redesigning the company website driven by a new technology program, primarily focused on Salesforce and its integrated technologies; Fonteva, Salesforce Lightning, and Bullhorn.

In addition to this, the business had several websites for different divisions of the organisation that were being replaced by the new software that also needed integrating and taking offline.

The Requirement

Fonteva has a front-end website editor that is sold as being fully customisable but lacks in many areas. The inability of the platform to provide an adequate or reasonable solution forced SOLACE to find a partner to develop a separate website that could then integrate into the required software.

In addition to the Fonteva issue, SOLACE had three websites, one for each aspect of the business:

Main Website
Events Website
Recruitment Website

Each had been built by different agencies, and none played nicely with the other. The solution had to combine these sites into one website and integrate the software solutions.

Approach and Strategy

BIAS takes a holistic approach to design and development. We strive to understand your market, your audience and your core business drivers in-depth, so that we can correlate every design and engineering decision directly back to helping you achieve your business goals.

We're huge believers in the power of collaboration. The more fluid our communications, the more powerfully we can achieve your goals. To deliver this outcome, our process has five stages:

Stage One: Research

We begin by performing a rigorous audit of your market space. Who is the core audience? What are their concerns and values? What are the needs of the business?

Stage Two: Prototyping

Prototyping involves a rapid and collaborative iteration of wireframe concepts, layouts and directions.

Stage Three: Design

Once we've agreed on finalised prototypes, the design team creates high-fidelity mock-ups of the final product.

Stage Four: Build

Then we bring those mock-ups to life. Bring up the staging servers and code up the designs.

Stage Five: Go Live & Measure

Finally, we go live to the world and measure your return on investment, with detailed analytics*.

The Result

After completing our initial analysis and coming up to speed on the Salesforce solutions, we presented a WordPress-led solution. The ease of WordPress and its familiarity with SOLACE meant that there were no adoption issues to be planned for.

As part of the redesign, we updated the look and feel of the incumbent website, but kept a design that typical website users wouldn’t find incredibly different and fitting to expectations.

Integrating Fonteva to WordPress

We integrated Fontevas registration and sign-on sequence into the WordPress design and masked URLs to ensure a smooth transition for users. By customising the limited page and menu features to match those of our updated WordPress design, users have a seamless transition between platforms.

Integrating Bullhorn to WordPress

Bullhorn is a native integration to Salesforce as a recruitment tool. SOLACE adopted this as a replacement for their incumbent WordPress solution. Whilst scoping this part of the project we learned that a 3rd party agency was custom-building micro-sites to showcase executive recruitment on behalf of SOLACE.

Whilst we weren’t privy to the financials we did present a new solution that would bring that capacity in-house and potentially save money in the longer term. We proposed to use WordPress’s multi-site feature and build three fully customisable templates that the internal recruitment team could use to build the microsites going forward.

Once this was signed off, we integrated Bullhorn into the microsites via webhooks ensuring that any applications for posted jobs are smoothly transitioned into the Salesforce/Bullhorn CRM.

Conclusion

The team at BIAS learned a lot working with the numerous platforms. A number of custom integrations were required as well as working with the business to help them take more control of their digital presence. All of this whilst keeping budgets in mind and keeping the business needs at the forefront of our design thinking.

This project really engaged our thought processes and highlights why, as a technical delivery partner in web and customised web solutions, we focus on companies looking at product-led solutions and being innovative in their respective industries.

We now have extensive experience in customising Salesforce solutions. Although we remain true to our HubSpot roots, we have learned that our pragmatic approach to planning technological solutions is a key strength, and our contract with SOLACE has been extended.

Our clients feedback

Paul is a natural leader with great communication skills, a sharp mind, and good business sense. I find Paul's style refreshing - I know what I'm going to get with him, and that's considered advice and support that's been tailored to the needs of our business.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Paul to prospective clients; he's been invaluable to Solace over the years.

Victoria Barton Rosenthal, Marketing Manager SOLACE

Custom website compression and 3rd-party platform integration