Clough Group's Website Transformation with Kentico 13 MVC by Dapth

From clunky to cutting-edge.

As a multifaceted and international organisation, Clough delivers high-performing assets across the energy, infrastructure, and resource industries. When we met the team, it was clear they required a high-performing website that was functional and reflected their brand to multiple user types.

Clough Group has a diverse workforce across Australia and the wider Asia Pacific region; with projects around the globe. Focusing on sustainability and innovation whist providing engineering, construction, and commissioning services, Clough has over a century of experience in the field. Taking on some of the largest and most logistically challenging projects, they also have experience in delivering solutions to a wide client base. Communication was key, which become the theme of their website project.

Services

Digital Design

Integration Development

User Experience

Website Development

Technologies

Kentico

The challenge

Why did Clough need to transform their web presence?

Clough were using WordPress as their content management system, which was creating considerable issues in load times, and bottlenecks in Clough’s ability to quickly and intuitively present new content to the public. They have a team located in the US, and at times the website would take almost a full minute to load.

As a large scale and multifaceted organisation, with many major projects taking place simultaneously, project information and prominently displaying it on the site was key. It was, therefore, imperative that the website provided a clear and concise user experience for all users that was also intuitive in its approach, allowing users to locate the information they need. Clough also needed the latest cutting-edge technology, features, and security.

Clough had three main challenges:

Ease of use for administrators to edit content independently.
Recreating information architecture to support multifaceted user types.
Website operating and load speed for international users.

Kentico Xperience was the chosen digital experience platform, and a key feature implemented was the ability to create localised content, i.e., different content positioning relevant to the individual’s location due to location-specific content featuring on the website. Furthermore, Clough wanted to make the job application experience seamless for users, as they wanted to encourage more job applications and position themselves as an employer of choice. That meant integrating with WorkDay to serve job postings from the platform onto the main website.

Discovery Workshops

The first step was high level discovery workshops and persona identification through a series of workshops. We started with over 80 navigable URLs in their sitemap, audited, analysed, and presented back what is seen and accessible on their website today.

Dapth identified that the mobile-optimised website design and information architecture (IA) needed to include the below:

Clean visual design incorporating brand guidelines and logos
Creation of mobile-optimised templates
Navigation redesign for an seamless user experience
Content flows with differing user funnels based on typical persona’s
Image adjustment feature (mobile-optimized with no cropping or distortion)

A clear theme from workshops was the need to communicate Clough’s capability to current and future clients through information about their markets, projects, sustainability, and news. They also wanted to convey the benefits of working with Clough to future employees through information about their projects, benefits, approach to sustainability, and news. They also specifically stated that the website would aim to have a ‘global reach’, although focused on Australia, the United States, and Canada.

Common user challenges discussed included:

No specific area of the site that has the content I am are looking for, or it is unclear where a user like myself should navigate towards.
There is no sitewide search function to find key information I am looking for to quickly access what I am after.
It is hard to find all the relevant information related to what I am looking for, or suggestions on what I should be looking at.
I am an American user - but everything is Australian based content (from news content to images used)
The website is slow to load and not mobile friendly.
Can’t find what a typical Clough workday looks like for an employee, and I can’t see employee benefits / perks as I know Clough has many.
The website is very difficult to use on mobile devices and hard to use.
I don’t want to swap between websites to view job positions available.

Optimised for success

Ensuring Clough staff are prepared for the future with intuitive web content management

To shape Clough’s future, we didn’t want Clough staff to be surprised (or confused) when working with web page content. It was important that WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editing was implemented. To ensure the website update process was convenient for staff, editors were given the capacity to schedule content to be published or unpublished, as needed. We also created a single media library to ensure all website images and other assets could be easily maintained and accessed, with the content team also given access to version control, allowing them to revert to previous versions where needed.

Some key technical website functionality goals included:

Faster load time across the regions
All pages to have separate URLs/clear URL structure.
Mobile-friendly
Drop-down navigation (or similar)
Visual display of text formatting in the back end to reflect front-end
Geo-specific contact information in the header and footer
News subscription feature
Integration with Workday for the careers ‘apply now’ section.

The result

What made this digital project a success?

Dapth were tasked to understand the current state of the Clough website and their goals. The findings showed Clough were looking for:

A long-term website solution
Presenting Clough in an aesthetically appealing way
Providing independence in managing content
The ability to grow and scale.

With an estimated cost given at the start of the project, validation and clarification was needed at initial meetings to define requirements and deliverables in more detail.

Dapth commenced this project with discovery workshops. We reviewed their current business challenges and organisational goals as well as historical website data. We then defined targeted users and features that would be needed to effectively cater for their needs. The new brief and estimates were based on the validate design output, which were confirmed and approved by the Clough stakeholder team.

Our proposal recommended a base delivery - that could then evolve with future phases, the first of project delivery to be delivered in a series of development sprints with intermittent testing by Cough. Kentico Xperience was identified as the recommended CMS for the site to be developed on. Training on this was also included within the project delivery scope.

As we started our investigation into the requirements of Clough, it became clear that Kentico CMS would give Clough’s current managers the highly intuitive management platform they were looking for. This provided website editors with the ability to ensure banner content always reflected Clough’s current focus and messaging.

A transformative impact

How did Dapth transform Clough’s website?

Dapth successfully transformed the Clough website from a clunky, outdated platform to cutting-edge and accessible, and providing a much-improved user experience (UX).

Clough was happy with the resulting website, and training provided, allowing them to retain complete control over the layout, content, and information architecture of the website. The team can continue to evolve the site to meet their ongoing long-term growth. In a very short delivery timeframe, we managed to achieve all of this.

To further improve the employment aspect of the website, the Dapth team integrated WorkDay, a third-party recruitment and job posting platform. This integration enabled Clough to promote jobs within their own website, rather than going through SEEK, LinkedIn, or other job sites. Integrating and importing data from WorkDay also enabled the use of custom widgets to cross-promote job opportunities across the site, as seen as Clough’s current content pages. The solution can now grow and evolve with future phases, as new organisational needs and features are required. The end of the user experience passes the user from the new custom job details page, book to the WorkDay platform, this is to leverage the WorkDay platform’s features and functionality.

The team at Dapth recommended a systematic approach in creating a fast website, with plans to leverage content delivery networks later if needed. They provided Clough with a highly intuitive management platform to edit content independently, removing the reliance on Dapth or any web developer.

The Kentico CMS gave content administrators full visibility into projects throughout the entire content lifecycle. Workflow features allowed each admin to define custom workflows, based on internal processes. A built-in asset library gave access to the latest version of an image, brochure, or presentation. Page versioning was also built-in as a feature.

Training was provided to Clough to retain complete control over the layout, content, and information architecture of the website. The team can continue to evolve the site to meet their ongoing long-term growth. In a very short delivery timeframe, we also managed to help with:

Mobile first responsive design
Email marketing campaign management
Quarterly and annual reporting integrations

The team at Dapth was able to deliver on these goals using Kentico Xperience and the use of widgets. The new website architecture provided significant improvements in speed, performance, and continuous integration. The Kentico Xperience CMS made it much easier for both administrators and front-end users to manage the site.