Background
CEPRES provides industry-leading investment technology and the world's largest private market data network to help investors. They had a difficult to manage Wordpress instance that was suffering from plugin hell, was difficult to update and was becoming a security liability. They wanted a best-in-class website to power their SEO, performance marketing and lead funnels. They were convinced Storyblok would be the right tool and reached out to us in 2022 as they were looking for vetted Storyblok partners to help.
Marc Allen
CMO
“Makers' Den delivered a best-in-class website that exceeded our sky-high expectations. They were also terrific business partners who quickly understood the role our website played in our go-to-market motion. The team was not afraid to challenge assumptions to deliver the best results. I look forward to a long relationship with them.”
How we worked together
CEPRES had a design partner which had already designed some mood boards for the website based on their existing brand guidelines.
We started off with a 2-hour kickoff where the CEPRES stakeholders, the design partner, and our team went through all the requirements, by walking through the initial wireframes and the plan for the page hierarchy. We set up our weekly sync meeting and created MS Teams channel for ad-hoc comms. We set the forecasted delivery date and milestones already based on our estimates and the team at hand.
We agreed to start with the home page, and that the home page sections would be utilized in latter pages so the content managers could leverage all created sections in Storyblok. The design partner would be 1 week ahead, creating wire frames for the next set of pages, and creating high fidelity designs for approved wireframes. The development team would implement the high fidelity design into code and scaffold the content in Storyblok. In the first iteration, while we were waiting for designs, we tackled the migration of hundreds of blog posts from their old Wordpress instance, and did all of the needed technical setup, including setting up the new lightning fast Vercel deployment environment, as well as Storyblok configuration.
In our weekly sync meeting we would walk through the new designs, as well as demonstrate the implemented pages in a demo environment, and in the context of Storyblok. Afterwards we would prioritize the tasks for the next week.
Above the fold on the homepage
The technical setup
The website is architected using best practices for marketing websites:
Content organized in Storyblok in a way intuitive for the content managers.
Support live previews for Content Managers so they can see what their content will look like as they edit.
Intuitive ways to control all relevant technical SEO including page H1, meta title and descriptions and OpenGraph image data
Automatically generate SEO relevant data, like site maps and JSON+LD for breadcrumbs, article metadata, etc.
Easy to create lead pages, with performance marketing setups so the visitor is more likely to convert
Top notch performance with high scores on Core Web Vitals
Best performing GDPR-compliant cookie consent platform setup, integrated with Google Tag Manager, and setup to drive visitors to approve efficient re-targeting/re-marketing
The core technologies used were:
Typescript - We aim to do everything with Typescript, and it’s what we’re really good at.
ReactJS - The frontend framework of our choice. Usually a central part of all our projects.
NextJS - We don’t like re-inventing the wheel, so leveraging existing ReactJS frameworks is our preference. NextJS was a really solid fit for this case.
Storyblok - Our Headless CMS of preference. It’s great for managing content, usually for marketing websites, but since this showcase was presenting marketing websites, it was a stellar fit.
TailwindCSS - Among the most popular styling solutions currently. It’s also a really good fit for marketing websites due to it having no runtime as most CSS-in-JS solutions do.
Interactive Ecosystem Section
The results
Cepres launched an industry leading marketing website, with an intuitive content organisation, easily managed by their content managers and marketers, and that out-performs their competitors' websites. It incudes integrations to their CRM, marketing tools and will allow them to elevate their online marketing to generate high value leads, ultimately propelling their business to the next level.
