Solution
Design
We started the design phase by collating, consolidating and rationalising every text style variant, colour treatment and component layout already in use on the website. Our goal here was to create a future-proof design system that would serve as the foundation for all new creative development.
With a clear, consistent and accessible design system in place, we were able to kick off the build of the core components. With the core build underway, we partnered with Frank Bright & Abel for the second phase of the design work.
Teaming FB&A's creative expertise with our deep understanding of UX, we designed a number of new components to maximise brand impact and showcase the distinct identities that underpin Gateley's corporate, employer and investor value propositions.
UX
Intuitive journeys
Creating an intuitive, user-friendly navigation structure was an essential first step in improving the user experience for the 1 million+ visitors that come to the site each year.
We started by identifying key website audiences, mapping the decision-making process they go through, and prioritising the key jobs that they need to get done along the way. This insight, along with 5 years of user data, enabled us to refactor and dramatically simplify the navigation and underlying information architecture.
In a world where it is now possible to build anything, a relentless focus on the audience not only ensured that we built the right thing up front, but has also allowed us to create an objective long-term framework against which the team can measure and optimise in future.
Editorial impact
We implemented our Showcase, Animation and Lottie modules on the new Gateley site. Together, they give non-technical editors the power to create truly impactful long-form content.
The modules give Gateley the ability to introduce interactivity into their storytelling and, in turn, improve user engagement and maximise conversion.
Gateley’s new ‘About us’ section and ‘Our story’ page are great examples of how the team have utilised our Showcase and Animation modules to deliver dynamically scrolling panels, stacked elements, and scroll-triggered animations.
In addition, our new Lottie animation plugin enables the team to embed ultra-lightweight custom animations. With Lottie Creator, editors can quickly and easily edit, recolour and animate existing graphics and then embed these animations anywhere on the site.
Platform
Enterprise functionality
Under the impactful new creative and friction-free architecture, there’s an upgraded tech stack; we deployed the latest iteration of our content marketing platform - JUMPSuite Enterprise.
JUMPSuite Enterprise is modular, scalable and built for content marketing, offering numerous benefits for the Gateley team:
- A simplified editorial interface allows non-technical users to quickly and easily create compelling article content and elegant interactive landing pages.
- Advanced versioning supports collaborative content creation across Gateley’s content teams.
- JUMPSuite's dynamic content promotion tool, an internal 'Ad network', enables the marketing team to instantly promote the latest and greatest campaigns across all relevant site content.
- The upgrade to JUMPSuite Enterprise gives the team reassurance that the product has long-term support for the next five years and beyond.
Speed and resilience
The Gateley website is substantial, with dynamically generated content across more than 2,300 articles, 650 professionals, 130 services, and a variety of creatively complex landing pages.
As visitor numbers grow and marketing-driven traffic spikes increase, the team wanted to ensure that the site remains available, stable, and lightning-fast for all users. To achieve this level of speed and resilience, we implemented Cloudflare caching across the site.
By default, Cloudflare caches all content on page; this significantly boosts speed but can create challenges for editors when their latest updates aren’t immediately visible externally. JUMPSuite Enterprise was built from the ground up to work seamlessly with Cloudflare while maintaining editorial control. When Gateley makes a change, JUMPSuite automatically signals Cloudflare to re-cache only the updated pages and dynamic content elements of related pages, ensuring that even minor edits are visible in real-time.
The impact? The new and upgraded site is on average 82.5% faster than the original, with a typical response time of just 0.62 seconds. In addition to improving speed, we’ve dramatically reduced variability; the performanc of the upgraded site is much more consistent, helping to reduce friction as users browse.
