Amplified digital presence with Kentico Xperience
BDO Canada is a network of public, accounting, tax, consulting, and business advisory firms that provide professional services. BDO Canada consists of more than 4,500 partners and professionals in over 125 offices across Canada. The global BDO network now spans across 160+ countries, employing 90,000 people in 1,600 offices.
Project Background
At the time we started working on this project, the BDO Canada website was 8 years old. It was built with an outdated version of Kentico that was no longer supported, and the site was showing its age. The website was originally a repurposed version of the American site with the French culture added to it and over the years it had become difficult to manage, update and expand.
The website was not optimized for mobile devices and needed an innovative design that represented BDO’s new vision and user centric approach to presenting information.
Digital Goals & Objectives
- Update the design of the website to reflect BDO’s new brand.
- Develop a tagging system based on the information architecture to serve as the basis for how content will be displayed on varying content widgets.
- Build a solution that is easy to manage with custom build drag and drop widgets (MVC) that would allow content editors to customize page layouts with ease.
Challenges
Design: the first challenge was to work with the design and to understand the intention behind it. BDO had been engaged with a design vendor that was not well versed on Kentico, so we weighed in heavily and thoroughly vetted the designs that were provided to us as part of the initial stage of the project.
Information Architecture: the process of understanding and reorganizing content was at the forefront of this project because the underlying structure of all the content determined the logic of various widgets as well as how we structured the website from a content administration perspective.
Content Administration: understanding the needs of the web administrators helped us in developing widgets with various controls to allow for maximum reusability and ease of use.
Scope of Work
Our Approach
Our role in this project was primarily focused on auditing the design, information architecture, and developing the website.
The Design
The process of auditing the design involved examining the proposed functionality of the design. There were many dynamic aspects of the design that needed to be examined and re-thought through a development / Kentico specific lens. We proposed solutions, consolidated items, simplified and expanded the design to suit the needs of content editors in this process. The audit involved an inventory of widgets, controls that allowed us to see how we can reduce redundancies and streamline the design.
Information Architecture
Custom Tagging System: We used the custom tables app extensively in this project to develop a customized tagging system to display content dynamically on a variety of widgets. Content editors would simply tag a page a certain way and it would display on widgets throughout the site depending on the logic of the widget. This not only greatly improved content admin but also lead to a seamless user experience.
In the example below you see a series of “insight” articles that display on this tax page. These articles are displaying dynamically based on the page’s tags.
.png)
Content Administration
Widgets and Page Builder: The Page builder was used extensively for this project. We streamlined the content editing process by simplifying the templates they were used to using into highly functional modular widgets to be used and reused with the Kentico Xperience Page Builder. They were now able to visually adjust their pages without needing to resort to sifting through templates and useless or depreciated form controls. We developed user interface widgets: accordion, tabs, image slider, image CTA, Image with text drawers, Reviews, CTA as well as repeating feed widgets and galleries. For widgets that connected to structured data we built corresponding page types.
Want to know more about web development
Let us show you how easy managing your website can be. Schedule a no obligation call with the top web development company in Toronto.
Working closely with Inorbital’s team, we built our new website using Kentico Xperience that included enhanced mobile experience, an intuitive search function, and greater visibility into our website conversions. The modernization of our website using Kentico Xperience enables our team to make dynamic updates to the website to support our organization’s evolving needs.
Results
The new website was awarded Kentico Site of the month and scored almost perfect straight A’s with webpagetest.org.
Project Details
The new BDO.ca website was built with the enterprise class Kentico DXP (Digital Experience Platform). The new website features an innovative design, added functionality and an information architecture that is all custom suited to the site’s various personas.
.png)