Optimizely Development: A Re-Platform for a More Modern and Capable CMS
TCDRS
About
TCDRS works with nearly 800 county and district employers to provide retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to more than 320,000 Texas public employees and retirees.
The Challenge
Oshyn’s long-standing client, TCDRS, asked Oshyn to collaborate with their design agency to build a three breakpoint, responsive Episerver (now Optimizely) website on a tight schedule with design, development, content entry, QA, and training all overlapping. The new site replaced a legacy site on SharePoint.
The Solution
Oshyn worked closely with the design agency and provided feedback on designs and behavior in different responsive breakpoints to achieve maximum efficiency. Every two weeks Oshyn delivered an iteration followed by a demo of progress on the site, enabling continuous and near real-time refinement. The pace of development was only achievable with Oshyn’s depth of Optimizely expertise and agency collaboration experience. From business stakeholder sessions, Oshyn gathered requirements, designed the technical solution, and implemented the back-end and front-end code.
The Results
TCDRS can achieve greater results with a new forward-thinking website. The responsive design is user-friendly with intuitive navigation, delivering a highly successful customer experience. In just 7 days following deployment, the bounce rate was decreased 42.7%. Underpinning the experience are 379 tests delivered by Oshyn’s deep automated testing expertise to keep code operating smoothly.
Oshyn leveraged out-of-the-box Optimizely functionality wherever possible and extended Optimizely core functionality by implementing 7 customers page types, 25 custom block types, 14 custom field types for Optimizely forms. A mobile-first design approach was developed using Bootstrap as a CSS responsive framework. The implementation of rich text templates gives editors extensive flexibility in how they can use components.
