As the world continues to change and evolve, so does Perficient. To better align with our commitment to being the leading global digital consultancy, we recently launched the new Perficient.com. Along with our new website, we rebranded to create a modern look and feel that matched the digital experiences we deliver to clients. Our digital consultancy now has a transformed brand identity and website that will help us to engage with customers and colleagues, both current and future, in a way that highlights the same caliber of expertise we provide.
Utilizing Sitecore for the New Perficient Website
Prior to the redesign, we were utilizing Sitecore as our content management system because it provided our team with the ability to update, edit, and create content easily. When looking to redesign, Sitecore was an easy choice because of our powerhouse team of Sitecore colleagues, MVPs, and global offshore delivery team. This, along with the improved functionality and features that we would obtain when upgrading to Sitecore 9.3, made choosing the right partner for our site an easy first step.
Another big objective was to become a more data-driven organization. Sitecore provides a better look at website analytics for user tracking and personalization. Future plans include utilizing analytics to gain insight to what users are viewing and where they are most often navigating to when visiting the site. This will allow us to create a better experience and enhanced connection and engagement with users.
Taking the Steps to Define Perficient
The process for redesigning the Perficient website involved stakeholders across the entire company. It began with a discovery phase to learn more about our brand, our buyer profiles, and our competitive differentiators, in order to best communicate our mission of being the leading global digital consultancy. Then, we conducted UX testing to validate our new site structure, which consists of our six service offerings.
We brought in our expert digital marketing team to help with content mapping and structure. We reviewed our web copy, conducted a brand study and workshop, and really honed in on our message to ensure that our website would reflect our brand and the work we do.
Empowering Content Authors
After extensive research and defining the Perficient brand, we began the development of the new website. Since our website has a substantial amount of content, a majority of the components built were content-oriented. It was also important that the content components built had an improved experience for our content authors. Previously, our internal marketing team leaned heavily on the content tree, which isn’t the ideal way to use Sitecore. Therefore, as part of the new website launch, our Sitecore team provided our marketing team with extensive training on how to utilize the Experience Editor.
With this training, our content authors were empowered to work more on component-based design. This allowed them to have a “drag and drop” type of functionality to make custom-built pages. It also allows them the ability to update components when personalization comes into play, ultimately providing them more opportunity to work without needing to lean on developers.
Improving and Integrating
In building the new website, we chose technology that would allow us to create a user friendly and engaging experience. Not only that, but we needed technology that offered a way for us to continue to improve that user experience.
For instance, we powered our site search with Coveo Cloud. Coveo provided the ability for us to highlight trending search topics to users and detailed search functionality to make site navigation more streamlined. Coveo also has the ability for us to tap into machine learning to understand users’ search habits, and subsequently better understand what content we need to offer to address search queries on the website.
Integrations also provided challenges to ensure we were able to connect with our systems and not create gaps between the website and our sales and marketing teams. We are now leveraging Sitecore Forms for our contact us page that integrates with our marketing automation tool and Salesforce. With careful planning, we were able to streamline the integration process so there was no interruption to our data team.
Looking to the Future
Currently, a majority of our website users view our careers page because, as a growing company, we are constantly hiring and looking to bring new people to our Perficient culture. But, looking to the future of our site and improvements to come, we hope that our site becomes a destination for users. Overall, we hope to provide an experience that is useful and provides insightful content, like our blogs or research that people seek.
Taking Experience to Help Clients
Although our Sitecore team has handled more than 150 deployments, being a key stakeholder body in the redesign is an entirely new experience considering we were the partner and the client. Moving forward, this will allow us to show real working examples of development, components, search, and more. In the end, having first-hand experience can enable our team to provide customers and prospects insight in a whole new way. Want to learn more? Reach out!
READY TO GROW YOUR SITECORE CAREER?
At Perficient, we continually look for ways to champion and challenge our talented workforce with interesting projects for high-profile clients, encourage personal and professional growth through training and mentoring, and celebrate our people-oriented culture and the innovative ways they serve Perficient and the community.
Learn more about what it’s like to work at Perficient at our Careers page.
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