Luxury Resort Websites Powered By Multilingual, Decoupled Drupal 8

The client had prospered over the years by acquiring and merging businesses across the globe. With dozens of resorts, a plethora of content across different websites, and the need to deliver a consistent, rich, and customized web experience to users, the client struggled due to previously disjointed efforts in the technology space.

These businesses had their independent web presence split across outdated HTML and CSS-based websites while their content was effectively scattered across different HTML files. The lack of a holistic content management system made it difficult to govern digital properties across multiple brands and websites.

They needed a multisite solution that would be scalable, robust, built on future-ready technology, and which would enable a stellar user experience (to both editors and visitors), with consistent branding and flow of actions.

1. Disparate, Archaic Web Tools The need for a centralized platform for managing websites across the group was the motivation for this project. As the client expanded their business with multiple entities, each came with its native, an independent website, and technologies. Various tools also led to an increased IT budget for maintenance.
2. Inconsistent Branding Since each entity of the group had its own way to manage web assets, the branding and the web presence was not remarkable. The brand identity was facing issues because of inconsistencies in website profiling and copy, media coverage, email communications, social media.
   
   
3. Poor User Experience Anything that isn't self-explanatory is disorienting for any web user, especially when there are multiple elements demanding attention. A poor UX leads to being associated with low-quality standards. Visual aesthetics of a website are essential because that's where the user first interacts with the brand.

Along with the design partner, Wunderman Thompson, and the client, Axelerant decided to go forward with atomic design patterns to bring structure to the content, and decoupled Drupal to enable better performance.

Leveraging the capabilities of Acquia’s Site Factory, Axelerant implemented a solution that used the same codebase to spin up new sites with ease. Site Factory offers an interface that allows easy management of multisite environments and provides supporting applications. Maintenance efforts after going live were also drastically reduced through codebase centralization.

Axelerant played a significant role in migrating the content from legacy digital systems into the modern framework. The next step was to work on responsiveness, look and feel, information flow, navigation and site performance. Because of multiple web tools, it was hard to achieve a unified brand identity, but migrating to one integrated platform helped give all group entities a similar and consistent brand experience, no matter which device or which region the user was accessing them from.

• Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Environment The target audience was based mainly in China. Internet access in China is restricted, meaning there are delays to sites hosted outside the country, so we implemented an API layer connection between Aliyun (Alibaba's cloud offering) for expediting the delay. For the rest of the world, we used Amazon Web Services (AWS).
  
  
• Content Re-modelling Our team helped set up a unified CMS that would enable effective content distribution across all the brands and websites with a standard Drupal backend and support for multiple frontend technologies. This activity made the platform flexible and scalable for future brands as well.
  
  
• Rich User Experience A consistent web experience can improve the customers' engagement time and raise the profits of the organization. Memorable and engaging experiences increase customer satisfaction, ultimately increasing user engagement and strategic positioning.
  
  

The client can now leverage decoupled Drupal 8 to deliver content to its sites to offer a consistent editing experience for content teams, and the ability to repurpose data between devices streamlines content management. Content updates are uniform across all platforms, eliminating the brand inconsistency.

• 60 stakeholders
• 6 sites
• 4 time zones

Even though it had aggressive timelines and collaboration across multiple stakeholders, the Axelerant team was able to deliver the project within the predefined time frame of 6 months, in an agile project development framework.

• Centralized web infrastructure The underlying architecture of all the websites stays common for all brands across the group. This centralized approach makes it easier to scale future brands and manage all the existing sites' digital properties in an organized fashion.
  
  
  
• Improved brand recognition After migrating from archaic methods that didn't help with brand recognition to Drupal 8, which provides a rich experience for managing all web properties effectively, the customer can now leverage consistent branding across all websites.
  
  
• Scalable, robust and future-ready Because of decoupled Drupal, there can be various tools for building frontend experiences while using a common backend. This provides flexibility and scalability to the solution, which can adapt to ever-evolving technologies.