Replacing an Outdated CMS with a Secure Drupal Experience
Overview
The Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) is the trade association for international manufacturers of heating, water heating, ventilation, air conditioning, commercial refrigeration (HVACR), and water heating equipment. A North American association with global interests and services, AHRI serves their membership of 300-plus HVACR and water heating equipment manufacturers in the U.S., Canada, China, Dubai, India, and Mexico. Their website provides insights into critical HVACR industry issues and is a valuable resource for certifications, standards, advocacy, analytics, and events. Because this site ran on a content management system that was being sunset, AHRI asked Velir to redesign it and migrate it to a more secure platform.
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Challenge
AHRI’s website was on a deprecated content management system (CMS), and their site experienced frequent security breaches, which led to extensive downtime. So, they approached Velir to re-platform their site on a more secure, modern system.
As part of the re-platform, AHRI requested that we redesign their website for a more global audience and that we combine the five separate sites they were running into a single cohesive experience for their members. There was a lot of valuable industry content for members on the previous site, but it was fragmented across four sections of business which had very different needs for how to display their information. So, AHRI needed help figuring out the best way to organize their content to make it more findable and provide a more beneficial user experience for their members.
Besides revamping the experience for AHRI members, AHRI also tasked us with streamlining their content authoring to make updating the new website faster and easier. AHRI selected Drupal—a cost-effective, secure, and leading-edge application for their needs. Once they chose Drupal, our goal for this engagement became to deliver a refreshed, modern, and strategically-driven Drupal website. We knew that by leveraging a more flexible and efficient application we could significantly improve the member and author experiences on AHRI’s site.
AHRI’s challenges included:
- Re-platforming their site to a more secure, modern system
- Redesigning their site for a more global audience
- Combining five separate sites into a single cohesive experience
- Reorganizing content to provide a better member experience
- Streamlining content authoring to make site updates faster and easier
Approach
To tackle this project, we followed our standard five-step redesign process: Discover, Envision, Design, Build and Test, and Launch. The density of AHRI’s content took some time to understand, but we were able to wrap our heads around it through extensive audience interviews. These interviews helped us comprehend the needs of multiple audiences including association members, product users (consumer and manufacturing), AHRI members from the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, and AHRI members in China. Talking to these audiences allowed us to develop our vision for a new AHRI website that would meet everyone’s needs.
To match the modern web platform, we planned to build AHRI’s site on, the association needed a refreshed look. To start, we conducted a design expression workshop with the AHRI team to align on their visual preferences. Then using inputs from that workshop, our designers created a cohesive new digital brand identity that could be applied throughout the new site. That identity maintained AHRI’s logo and colors but offered expanded fonts and other design elements that would translate better to digital mediums.
To further make sense of AHRI’s fragmented content, we performed a full content inventory of their site to see what was available. Our UX experts then reorganized and streamlined that content, crafting a future-state content matrix to establish what the new navigation and content would look like on the redesigned site.
Another sizable task we had was to migrate a massive amount of content from the old site to the new one. Since the previous CMS was deprecated, we didn’t have a way to automatically migrate content. So, we had to manually move decades of AHRI’s content, which included 500 pages and 2,000 PDFs. To ensure content authoring would be easier moving forward, we deployed Acquia’s Site Studio, which offered AHRI more user-friendly ways to make site updates.
Last, but not least, we had to make all AHRI’s integrations function effectively with their new site. Our technical teams integrated a complicated network of legacy systems into a single digital experience, which involved coming up with creative solutions to connect them all successfully. We also integrated vital association systems like NetForum with the site to give AHRI members access to the membership information they need daily.
Our approach included:
- Interviewing multiple audiences to understand their unique needs
- Creating a new digital brand identity based on client design inputs
- Analyzing content to craft a future-state organization for the site
- Manually migrating decades of content from the old site to the new one
- Integrating a complex network of legacy systems into a single digital experience
Solution
We delivered a refreshed, modern, and secure Drupal website for AHRI that streamlines their content, integrates critical systems, and serves a wide variety of their audiences. It presents a new digital identity for AHRI, while housing decades of valuable content for members. It also offers a streamlined member experience, as well as an easier content authoring workflow that allows AHRI’s teams to keep up with content updates.
Results:
- A more secure, modern website with a new digital identity
- Reorganized content and streamlined navigation
- Five websites folded into a single cohesive experience
- 500 pages and 2,000 PDFs manually migrated to the new site