New corporate website for Ballast Nedam
Since 2006 in collaboration with Ballast Nedam ICT, Novaware has been developing websites, applications, and interfaces between systems for Ballast Nedam. This construction company belongs to the top 5 construction companies in the Netherlands. In this case, we highlight 1 of the projects.
A Corporate Website is the business card of your organization. It is the ideal place to show online who you are, what you do, and what you stand for. However, a good Corporate Website is not only important for informing customers, prospects, partners, and other stakeholders. Your colleagues must also be able to work with it.
Therefore, it is wise to choose a CMS that allows employees to easily organize and publish the right content. Umbraco is particularly suitable for meeting this need. Why did Ballast Nedam choose a Corporate Website with Umbraco CMS?
4 Challenges for a new Corporate Website
#1 Time: completion within 4 weeks
Time is perhaps the most important factor in projects. This was also the case for Ballast Nedam's website project: the entire website had to be developed and provided with the right content within four weeks. At the same time, work had to be done on a new design. Delay was not an option, as a press release about the acquisition of the construction company was ready to go.
#2 Working with a staging environment
A second important requirement was the creation of an DTAP environment with the ability to edit content on a separate staging environment. This allows Ballast Nedam editors to create and review content before it is made available on the production environment.
At the same time, it was important to give a select group of editors permissions to write and publish press releases. It was essential for Ballast Nedam that sensitive company information was not leaked prematurely.
#3 Integration with 10.000 projects
Ballast Nedam is not just any project organization. The company has a huge database of no less than 10,000 projects. These projects had to be made findable on the new Corporate Website of the construction company.
#4 Sharing news via multiple websites
The final major challenge was the distribution of information via multiple websites. This had to work through a system of approval. In addition, 5,000 articles had to be moved from different old content management systems to one CMS: Umbraco.
Flexible approach for a new corporate website with Umbraco
Given the delivery deadline, we decided to first deliver the CMS part. This allowed editors to start placing content after just one week.
At the same time, work was done on a new website design. Normally, this happens before the CMS is developed. But thanks to a design that used Umbraco grid layouts, the team was now flexible enough to respond to changes in Ballast Nedam's requirements.
What results did this project achieve?
This project has delivered several significant results, thanks to the use of Umbraco as the CMS platform. The team was able to set up a Multisite solution from the beginning, allowing all websites to be managed from one central CMS.
Other important deliverables include:
- A fully automated DTAP environment, giving the client greater control over the process;
- An integration between Umbraco and the project database, including a dashboard that allows editors to determine which project information should be displayed or modified;
- A workflow for sharing content between different (multilingual) websites, with various levels of permissions and automated notifications for editors.
These results are visible and tangible to the users of the new CMS. However, they are not the most important to our team. Ultimately, the goal is a satisfied client.
And in that regard, we have succeeded!
