When our business group, Raccoons, decided to rethink their entire marketing strategy, vision, and accompanying brand, they reached out to us actually to bring it to the end user through a robust and scalable custom website. As a technology powerhouse, the best way to display your in-house expertise is by showing it off on your website, right? So, we got to work.

Integrations

The old, outdated website that was in place before the current one taught us a lot. First of all, as an innovator, Raccoons loves to use software-as-a-service tools (SaaS) to provide a better experience to potential customers, employees, or anyone visiting the website. Think of HubSpot for the blog, forms, and meeting plug-ins; Recruitee for the hiring process; Transistor to distribute their podcast Radio Raccoons to the right places; or YouTube to show off demos and testimonials of use cases.

In the old website, these tools were often integrated in a quick and dirty way (can you blame a start-up?), for instance, by redirecting to different subdomains. This way, the blog was published separately on ‘blog.raccoons.be’, and you could also find the podcast on a different domain. Not very user-friendly, so the new website had to be integrated well to be more scalable and SEO-friendly. No more redirects.

Component-driven

Next up on the list of requirements? A list of necessary components. As content-driven, big websites can quickly become hard to manage; we preferred to break the website down modularly. This resulted in a scalable, easy-to-build yet robust website as every component can be reused in any needed combination.

Secondly, to handle these components, we needed a user-friendly CMS where non-technical people could also make changes to the website’s content. Enter Sanity, a unified content platform that powers better digital experiences. Through Sanity, the Raccoons team can collaborate on the website in real-time and review changes. Configuring a content block was never easier: choose the component you need, for example, a ‘page hero’ or a ‘long copy’ section, and fill in the copy as desired. Quickly reviewed in staging and then pushed to the website in no time.

New, user-friendly design

Of course, with a new website usually comes a new design. Based on new brand guidelines, we designed a future-proof yet elegant website. As Raccoons offers a range of content about innovation and technology, it was of the utmost importance that this was easily accessible, readable, and searchable.

Of course, a website is never really finished. The good news is that with this scalable website, they can continue building without having to rethink its structure entirely.