Bärenmarke Website Relaunch

Corporate

Summary

At the beginning of 2019 Bärenmarke wanted to change its website appearance fitting to their new created brand positioning. The website should show what the brand stands for and that Bärenmarke grows to a real family brand with being more emotional, closer to family realities and not only as formal and informative as before. It was our task to transfer this new positioning and the associated values into creative designs and have them implemented on the new Drupal 8 website.

Case description

As part of their rebranding efforts Bärenmarke needed a robust portal with a modern design that would let them showcase their products as well as set up new custom campaigns. With high demands both for administrability as well as development speed for new campaigns, it was necessary to come up with a methodology that would be able to marry the use of highly flexible and reusable components with customized pixel-perfect designs.

Case goals and results

* Come up with a clear strategy of how to divide contents into two categories:
- Optimized for easy content management
- Optimized for customized animated designs
* Allow for rapid prototyping of new campaign landing pages that can easily be integrated and allow the use of Drupal functionality and components where necessary
* Tight integration with media and social campaigns
* Creation of interactive stories for campaigns that cooperate smoothly with reusable Drupal components
* Integration of Magento Shop
* Ensure good performance, accessibility and SEO, although the website consists of many images and animations (see screenshot Lighthouse Audit)

Challenges

* Handle all the different page designs within a single Drupal site
* Integrate all the animations
* Create a system of reusable misc components

Our biggest challenge was to provide more than a website. We had to deliver a platform that would constantly have to handle new updates due to Bärenmarke's strong presence and activity in the media. These updates had higher requirements than your typical content updates in classic CMS situations. Bärenmarke's campaigns are bold statements that reinforce the brand's importance and need to be able to break out of the basic design guidelines without causing trouble.

Community contributions

Drupal modules
* Webform Email Confirmer: https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/jlbellido/3058231

Other patches
* Migrate Default Content / Add support for video module / https://github.com/Ymbra/migrate_default_content/pull/60
* Migrate Default Content / Extract field type from the field class hierarchy / https://github.com/Ymbra/migrate_default_content/pull/61
* Migrate Default Content / Read fields to migrate from all the entities, not only the first one / https://github.com/Ymbra/migrate_default_content/pull/63
* Migrate Default Content / migrate_default_content_generic_field_type cleanup / https://github.com/Ymbra/migrate_default_content/pull/66
* Migrate Default Content / Move migration definitions generation process to a separate service / https://github.com/Ymbra/migrate_default_content/pull/74
* Metatag routes / Default tags are not being overridden + possible architecture change / https://www.drupal.org/project/metatag_routes/issues/2953332
* Quicktabs / Provide a Configuration Schema / https://www.drupal.org/project/quicktabs/issues/2938221
* Quicktabs / Make Quick Tabs entities translatables / https://www.drupal.org/project/quicktabs/issues/2951498
* Social feed aggregator / Run social_feed_aggregator_create_node() as root user to avoid duplicated nodes / https://www.drupal.org/project/social_feed_aggregator/issues/2955446
* Imagecache external / Fallback image is not being used when Guzzle throws an exception / https://www.drupal.org/project/imagecache_external/issues/2955453
* Social feed library / Fix error when processing items where from property is not set #1 / https://github.com/brynj-digital/social-feed/pull/1
* Exclude node title / Use state API instead of configuration to store the list of excluded nodes / https://www.drupal.org/project/exclude_node_title/issues/2974973

Why should this case win the splash awards?

With Bärenmarke we have created a website that uses most creative designs and frontend technologies to provide a new brand experience, but still we manage to keep and make use of Drupal's capabilities. We closely collaborated across all departments (UX, Visual Design, Development) to ensure the best user experience without losing technical functionalities. The client is happy with the result and we continue to implement and integrate new campaigns.