It was a dark and stormy night. The sound of tornado sirens filled the air as more than seven inches of rain swamped the Milwaukee area at rush hour on July 22. The expressway flooded and was closed. A giant sinkhole swallowed an SUV on the east side as basements across the area filled with water. It was truly a “100-year flood” – but wasn’t it like the third one we’ve had already this decade?
And as I sat at my desk with the rain pounding on the roof, silently sending warm thoughts toward those who would be affected by the deluge, I took comfort in the thought that the awesome new SRAM site we’d been working so hard on had launched three days earlier – safe from the rising waters.
Too soon? Sorry … it’s just that we’re very proud of this new site, and that really is what I was thinking about as the storm blew in. Here’s why …
Not only did sram.com launch the all-new model year ’11 product, along with a design refresh for each of the six brands, it also consolidated all six brand sites into a common platform and Drupal Content Management System (CMS).
Sounds easy, right? Not so much. But our amazing team made it seem easy. They’re that good. Here are a few bullets to illustrate the magnitude of the project and give you a snapshot of some of the inclusions:
- The SRAM site contains over 350 products across six different brands and 45 different branded product families.
- A total of 21 content types for all the different products are included in the site, with each content type containing as many as 38 data points.
- The new site-wide taxonomy system allows for products to be included as a members of multiple brands, series and/or riding types, meaning a single content source can appear in multiple places throughout the site – even across multiple brands.
- SEO-friendly URLs were utilized throughout.
- The CMS revision management maintains an ongoing history of all site changes with user tracking and roll back.
All project goals were met on this project, including the challenging goal of maintaining each brand’s uniqueness while integrating them all on a common platform and user experience. And it was all delivered on schedule!
This was an exceptionally technical project, with a very large amount of data and content to manage. As one of our busiest sites, serving nearly 5 GB of data each hour, that’s is a lot to absorb – kind of like seven inches of rain. Good thing we’re so much better equipped to handle it than the streets of Milwaukee are to handle all that water!
Thanks to everyone on the team for all their hard work – and to SRAM for trusting us with such an exciting and satisfying project.
