Problem

Well several problems actually. First we needed a way to communicate with employees outside of email and Slack and because we had 10K-20K page views on our internal site every month, the employee site seemed like the best place to start. We came up with the idea to have an area where we would be able to upload news/announcements specific to that region of the site. So Finance specific announcements would clog up the HR landing page. The company had some limitations on how much they were willing to spend to have all of the redesign and development work completed, so we were working with a tight budget from the jump. Because of the project requirements and budget constraints, we found WordPress was the best choice for a CMS.

Solution

We began by mapping out the site and all the potential pages we might need, which as you can see by this Miro chart, was quite extensive. There were well over 100 pages that needed to be migrated or created for the final site, so the real time collaboration available through Miro was very helpful.

With WordsPress, we were able to use custom post types and fields to give each post the ability to be shown on any number of landing pages including the homepage of the site. It also allowed us to use several plugins to achieve not only the goal of communicating with employees, but build a document access system so employees can have easy access to their forms and documents they use on the daily. For access to all of the files, the Real Media Library plugin was used to organize files on the back end, while custom fields were used to organize and display the information on the front end of the site.

To keep creating and editing pages simple for a group of 13 content managers, we used the WPBakery Page Builder plugin. This allowed for simple drag and drop interface for creating great looking content. A design system was developed to keep content in check with so many people having access to the CMS.

Overall this was a great project and I feel we solved the presented problems in a sufficient manner. If I were to spend more time on this site, I would add some additional filtering options for the document system, smooth out a few mobile edge cases with some additional styling, and ideally integrate the site with an email system to auto generate marketing emails based on story uploads to the site.