Harcros Chemicals Case Study

Discovery & Design

Harcros is a large, multinational chemical manufacturing company with global operations. When they came to us, their current website was outdated, broken and non-responsive. They needed a modern site that accurately reflected the size of their operations and catered to the needs of their business clients. Their current website was hosted on an insecure CMS, so the decision was quickly made to rebuild it from the ground up using Drupal 8.

Our team of designers fleshed out the design and UX of the new website inhouse, and met with the client to review all designs. Page templates, menus, and elements were all carefully crafted to the high standards that the Harcros brand demanded. Multiple menus were created and seamlessly integrated into the design to allow for a natural customer UX.

Buildout

To expedite the buildout process, our developers worked simultaneously on front end styling while another team built out the backend. Since many elements of the website were reusable, we first focused on building out and styling those features using Twig components. Once the initial elements were created on the landing pages, our developers were able to take those components and quickly integrate them into the rest of the website.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was integrating the 3rd party service Taleo into the site. Taleo is an Oracle based career search database that was created in the early days of the internet, and since then has maintained most of its antiquated code and structure. Our developers were able to take API calls and conform all data into a usable structure. We also seamlessly integrated and styled their webforms to match the rest of the sites branding.

Throughout the buildout process, our project managers QA’d features and styles on the website as they were created and pushed to our development server. Utilizing Twig components along with BEM naming conventions helped to reduce development time by ensuring that developers were only styling the components they were focused on. We then worked to migrate all of their existing data over to the new site by creating a custom import module which could easily handle the large amount of data that they had to migrate.

Once the site was complete and data was transferred over, we cloned the site to our staging server and handed it off to the clients for QA prior to launch. As Harcros provided feedback, we tweaked designs and updated functionality.

Launch

Upon launch Harcros had a modern, responsive website that matched their international stature. User experience is improved, and the product search with categories makes it easy for potential clients to locate and request product samples. Taleo Career Search was seamlessly integrated into the site. As they expand and acquire new companies they also have the ability to add large amounts of data to their site with our custom import module. Harcros’s new site elevates their brand and effectively showcases the size of their multinational operations.

Moving Forward

Sites evolve, culture shifts and requirements change. That’s why we don’t just focus on delivering an excellent site - we also focus on maintaining an ongoing relationship with our clients. We continue to provide support for Harcros and work to ensure that any future needs or feature build outs are handled quickly and professionally.