Aptim
Situation/Challenge: APTIM provides solutions to a variety of clientele from many different industries including Government, Industrial/Commercial, Oil, Gas, and Chemical as well as Power. The services, products, and projects offered are wide and varied. For this reason, it was difficult for clients to get to the information they needed quickly and accurately. It was also a challenge to integrate all of the information into a site that would be easy to navigate. Time was of the essence, initial discovery and brainstorming had just begun late-summer of 2017, with the goal set to have everything ready by the 3rd week of March 2018.
APTIM’s development goals for the site were three: efficiency, ease of use (for both admins and end-users), and wide browser compatibility. In addition, it all needed to allow APTIM to truly put their firm on display and convey their message loud and clear in both the U.S. and abroad.
Objective – The site was built so that a client could visit the site and get to the information they needed quickly and easily. By creating a homepage that served as an informational and visual search, within one click the client would see all of the services, products, and projects associated with their key search phrase. From there they could dive deeper into secondary and tertiary products and associated projects.
Strategy/Tactics – The first consideration when putting things together was what CMS to use. In order accomplish Aptim’s goals, it needed to be both Headless, so that the data entered within could be easily accessed by any application should APTIM in the future need it, and also provide a competent UI for editors to be able to put pages/views together without requiring a developer; something quite rare in the current market for Headless CMS. We also needed multi-language translation out of the box. Ultimately, we chose Prismic CMS, as the features provided were in line with what was needed and the UI was highly customizable. The next consideration was the speed. Algolia is a highly customizable, optimized, and well-supported search database service that was then configured and integrated with the codebase alongside a long-lived page cache and several smaller data caches. This caching system cut load time across the site dramatically. Lastly, browser compatibility, care was taken to make use of widely supported CSS properties and methods and applying the latest innovations in front end development. A build process was set up to transpile object-oriented ECMAScript 6 JS code through Babel into polyfilled vanilla JS and then minify and concatenate all assets and dependencies. This allowed the site to load even quicker, as well as display and operate perfectly on older browsers like Internet Explorer 10.
Message Alignment – APTIM’s tagline, “Expect the Extraordinary” was the foundation for all of the site’s messaging. APTIM has been instrumental in some of the world’s largest projects. The magnitude and success of these projects are highlighted throughout the site and projected through the voice that content is presented in.
Results – The website was launched on time by the end of March 2018. The APTIM website had a 733% increase in monthly users. The old site was averaging about 1,800 monthly users. The new site quickly began averaging 11-12k monthly users and is now averaging about 15k monthly users.
– 129,614 New Users
– 34,000+ Search Operations
– 461,685 Page Views
– <400ms Average Time to First Byte
Production:
Consulting, Server Setup, Front and Back End Development
Additional Credits:
Katie O’Malley – Site Design