SteadyGo | AAR Umbraco Case Study

Summary

The AAR Group is a dynamic management consultancy that specialises in helping brands establish and manage successful marketing partnerships.

They work with clients looking to connect with agency partners to deliver brand management, PR and digital transformation.

The AAR Group also supports agencies as impartial new business and pitch consultants, advising on everything from brand positioning to pitch presentation techniques and developing pricing structures.

SteadyGo were appointed to redesign and build their website in Umbraco 8 to make sure their website was futureproof, super simple to edit and help drive organic growth.

The Challenge

The previous website was built in WordPress. The backend has gotten unwieldy, and many areas were hardcoded which made content management a huge barrier for AAR. The team needed every part of their website to be fully content managed without development support.

The single level website navigation wasn’t easy for users to find what they were looking for. It was tricky to find many of the deeper pages and was sub-optimal for the search engines.

The website looked tired and outdated, so it was up to our team at SteadyGo to create a vibrant look that packs a punch and really showcases their exciting, new brand personality.

Our approach

Based on the newly created brand guidelines, our design team created a digital style guide. We wanted to establish the design standards across the website, for key components and interactions, to create a universal visual style.

We rolled out the new design concept across the core website templates making sure the new design was visually engaging with a clear and concise new multi-level navigation, which was categorised in line with the client’s new service proposition. Prominent CTAs were used to signpost users key conversion points such as enquiry forms, downloading useful business resources and listening to podcasts.

Throughout the project we worked very closely with AAR’s external SEO team to make sure that all best practice elements were in place before launch such as site speed, mobile optimisations, meta data, sitemap and redirects, to achieve a search friendly migration.

The website itself was CMS was built in Umbraco 8 and every single element of the website is setup to be managed via an intuitive and user-friendly interface. With a high rate of content creation and editing, the content structure, ease and speed of management were a high priority. To achieve this we added:

Automated content node creation - required content nodes are now created automatically saving editors time and ensuring content structure is correct

Usync Complete - used to create an enterprise content publishing workflow which allows editors to fully preview their work on a staging environment before publishing to the production site