Saving the planet
one wall at a time
ANS Global case study
The Brief
Clean and elegant
Provide a clean and elegant design implementation in-keeping with a recent re-brand exercise, in collaboration with ANS Global's marketing team.
Improve UX
The new website should be easy to use and navigate, whilst masking the complex relationships between content to create a seamless user experience.
Improve content relevancy
Link areas of content together via tagging, so technical pages can display relevant articles and case studies in line for better content discovery.
Improve site speed and SEO
Aim to improve Google pagespeed insights score, and technical SEO implementation to allow an SEO agency more control over individual page SEO.
Connected content
For example, the case studies are linked to locations, applications, environments, technical articles, products and more which can then be used to filter case studies and feed them through to individual informational pages which live under each of these sections. In the green roof section you'll find an interactive map which helps site visitors find their local green roof merchant - of which there are over 800. For each country that the company operates there needed to be an ANS member of staff as the main point of contact and this interconnects with the staff page in the about section of the website.
The site also needed to be flexible enough to allow content editors to build out pages and add content on a daily basis, with a great deal more control given to the company's content editors that is typical for a website of this size.
A platform for complex content management
Due to the high number of cross-links between several of the site's pages and the mapping requirements we opted to build the site in Drupal 7 as it is a tried and tested platform for large scale, complex data structures. Mark Chambers at ANS Global provided the initial designs, which gave a clear indication of white space and the use of imagery to make the site come alive. This helped our own digital designer, Darren, to implement these designs using the new "Paragraphs" approach to content design to allow editors at ANS Global to create new pages without intervention from the team here at Pivale.
Relevant content
Generic content feeds were built to take contextual information from each page so that relevant similar articles were displayed helping visitors to continue on their journey. For example, on the United Kingdom location page - only United Kingdom case studies are shown, and on the Living Wall Hotels page - only Living Wall case studies are shown, which have been tagged as being Hotels case studies etc. When on a specific case study page an algorithm was built to match as many attributes of the case study with others on the site. Our developers were able meet the site-specific requirements to accurately find "Similar Case Studies".
The end result is that the the staff responsible for content at ANS can simply create content and it automatically displays in all the right areas. This helps not only reduce that amount of administration and active-thought required when adding content, it's also great for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - i.e. landing pages are continually updated keeping pages relevant and fresh which scores highly when search engines compare against previous versions of the site.
Auto geocoded maps
We achieved the various maps on the site by transforming physical addresses to longitude and latitudes which are then displayed via the Google Maps API. There are many other solutions put in place to solve real world business problems such as:
- Contact forms.
- Inclusion of various data feeds and specialist items on any page for the best possible user experience.
- Multiple cross-links and outward bound linking to improve SEO.
- SEO optimisations allowing ANS Global editors to add alt tags to images, meta tags to pages
- Automated image compression, scaling and cropping and caching meaning less work for content administrators
Launching a wealth of content
We have been impressed with the shear amount of quality content that the client was able to put together. This, together with the endlessly flexible Drupal Content Management System, has resulted in a website that we are proud to exhibit as one of our primary case studies for a content rich website.
It was a pleasure for us to be able to work with the team at ANS Global, and in particular Mark Chambers, whose passion and dedication to content creation has resulted in a truly beautiful looking website. ANS Global are quite literally saving the planet one wall at a time and we couldn't be prouder to be involved!