Drupal Website for Sanitas Troesch

Initial Position

The most important requirement of the parent company, Saint-Gobain, was to merge the two existing websites of Sanitas Troesch and migrate to Drupal 9. This was for IT security reasons and to standardize the group's IT infrastructure. This change should also be used for a facelift of the design, the development of clear information architecture and user-friendly navigation. Sanitas Troesch has big plans in the area of marketing and needs a solid, modern website that can form the basis of all future activities. The focus should be on an improved user experience and making it easier to find the relevant information. The motivated Sitewerk team replied with "Challenge accepted!"

The Implementation

The aim was to bring an initial version of the Sanitas Troesch website online in the first quarter of 2022, which could be continuously expanded from then on.

Agile Approach According to Scrum

In order to be able to relaunch the websites within seven months, Sitewerk immediately hired a self-organizing, interdisciplinary and international team of experienced full-stack developers, UX/UI designers and SEO specialists from our partner agency We Venture.

At the same time, technical and non-functional requirements, such as the interface of the existing IT infrastructure or the requirements for performance and data protection, were defined with the help of the customer's various stakeholders.

The Near Shoring developer team in Minsk was accompanied by a department here in Switzerland responsible for project management, requirements and design. The website's MVP was implemented within 11 sprints and then successfully published.

The open source solution Drupal offers valuable advantages.

Based on the requirements of the parent company, the choice of CMS Drupal became clear from the start. Some of the main advantages are:

• Versatile Application Possibilities
• The code is open source and therefore there are no license costs. The active Drupal community keeps the platform up to date.
• The lean basic installation can be expanded with flexibility using the API-First approach, with a large number of freely available modules.
• It is proven to meet high security standards and is constantly being maintained and optimized.
• Pages built with Drupal are extremely SEO friendly.
• Drupal is Mobile First and compatible with all end devices, whether smartphone or tablet.
• Extremely high-performing for multilingual, multifunctional and content-rich websites
• Easy to handle

This CMS combines high flexibility with technical versatility and user-friendliness to form a balanced system.

The Biggest Challenges of the Project

• Finding solutions and compromises that meet all the needs and requirements of the different stakeholders on the customer side (GL, marketing teams, product teams, internal IT,..)
• Challenging schedule (seven months)
• Prioritization of the necessary requirements as the scope of the MVP release
• Drupal core updates presented the development team with major challenges.
• The home office obligations of the widely distributed team, meant that communication and meetings were mainly virtual. For a project of this size and the number of different stakeholders, this required an intensive and regular exchange.

Features

• Multiple Languages
• Flexible creation of page templates via the layout builder