Appco Group worldwide - Responsive website and CMS

Company:

Appco Group

Business case:

Appco Group needed to find a way to improve their CMS solution and build over it, websites for all Appco offices around the world. These websites would have to follow a template and keep brand and elements guideline across them all. Another big issue was making them easily trackable by crawlers and well rated performing according to Google page speed. So far, the SEO strategy was purely content related. Issues like loading time, bounce rate, friendly URLs and headings were not being tackled or developed. 

In the backend, the CMS needed some critical UX amendments in order to make it operational and easy to use by communication managers worldwide, a big challenge considering none of them have a technical background. Our goal was make them able to edit, add and remove pages, content articles and images, giving also SEO fields to be filled, such as alt for images, meta tags for pages and pre-defined headings. 

Solution:

My first step to start planning was converting all current websites in numbers, as mentioned before none of the website were controlled by analytical tools, making any change or development a matter of guessing. To measure the SEO quality, I’ve brought WebCEO and Screaming Frog. To understand visitors’ behaviour and website usage I’ve setup GWT and Google Analytics. And finally, to understand user interaction, I’ve map all pages by heat maps. Some other measurement tools like Page Speed and Pingdom were used while coding test in the new templates.  

Numbers done, time for planning. In this step, me and the communication head manager decided based on my reports what we should promote in benefit of the business and what should be secondary. The sitemap was re-organised and the navigation now seems to be more relevant for what visitors looking for. The information architecture was finished and so the wireframes. Before start the layouts, I’ve established the common elements and spread them along the wireframes: pictures, colour palette, iconography and typography.

Appco Group worldwide

Appco Group have offices and business in 15 countries, and as mentioned before, this project aim to be helpful for all country managers, allowing them, even if not experts with web tools, keeping their website up to date. I've highlighted some examples such as appcogroup.com (intended to be a portal to access all countries, showing also international news, company's philosophy, story, etc.) and some other countries, e.g.: USA, Italy, Spain and Poland.

SEO, performance and numbers overview

Appco Group website were not responsive, used to take more than 10 seconds to load, had several crawl errors and on-site gaps of information and relevant content. I've listed all issues classifying by priority, managed the backlog and planned the versions releases. 

Below I pointed out some graphics proofing the work that me and my team have done together. Personally, this subject makes me feel real proud as we came from a deep level of unsettlement till reach zero issues mark-up. Same kind of ongoing consultancy is still managed by me, giving assistance not just for UK but for all the other countries.