A Future-Focused Website Overhaul
Ixia, a large public company leading the market in network testing, needed a new website to support its growth into the broader enterprise market. They were saddled with a large, slow site that was hard to navigate and administer. Ixia came to Chapter Three for a complete design and development overhaul. We built their new site in Drupal 8 to take advantage of the speed, authoring experience and sophisticated architecture it provides.
Radically Improving the User Experience
Ixia needed to simplify the presentation of its robust offerings to help target the enterprise market and sell its services to a larger audience. We collaborated with Ixia’s CMO to reduce the site size and complexity by 50%. We improved the user experience by:
- Moving support material off-site
- Deleting low quality and redundant content
- Redesigning the pages to be easier to read
- Making products easier to find
Easy Administration with Drupal 8
Drupal 8 made it easy to create a user-friendly authoring experience to craft pages from flexible components. The authoring experience that was so intuitive that Ixia’s CMO was able to log on and create content with no training.
We’ve focused on creating flexible, modular page layouts for years, striving for increasingly elegant solutions with each project. With Ixia, we reached new heights, providing a high level of design sophistication that doesn’t require a designer for each page. We improved the administration experience by:
- Providing three visually intuitive styles for each content slice
- Rebuilding the site entirely with Entity References
- Building image dimensions into every image field
- Adding detailed help text throughout the site
Speed and Performance
Ixia needed to drive new sales in enterprise sectors by illustrating the value of testing, securing and monitoring networks. We used Drupal 8’s performance and caching capabilities to dramatically improve site performance. Drupal 8 offers a powerful toolkit for front-end developers with know-how to theme sites in a highly performant ways. We took advantage of these performance enhancing tools and techniques to create a very speedy site.
Ixia Moving Drupal 8 Forward
Ixia provided Chapter Three with an opportunity to increase the momentum of Drupal 8 development. Not only did Ixia get a cutting edge site, but the project also offered an opportunity for us to help port contrib modules to Drupal 8 and address issues that are unique to production sites. Along the way, we reduced 175+ contrib and custom modules to just over 30. These efforts paved the way to translate the site into eight different languages using Drupal 8’s powerful translation platform.
A Collaborative Brand Refresh
While Ixia worked on a print-focused identity refresh with an outside agency, we collaborated with their design team to evolve their efforts. We extended their color palette, explored new graphic direction, and updated typography to work better for the web.
The new site design is substantially lighter, showcasing streamlined content that’s quicker and easier to digest. Active participation from all teams contributed to a fully integrated brand reboot, with the work of each team informing the other.
Extending the Visual Language
We partnered closely with Ixia to create original illustrations, source new photography, and help authors understand and follow content guidelines. We built out an entire library of illustrations to support their product and solutions pages. We worked with Ixia designers to solidify the photography direction within its new brand guidelines and source photos that complemented the website design and project goals. Finally, our content strategy experts worked closely with Ixia’s product team to guide them on how to adapt and structure their content for the new design.
