A clean and vibrant future.
CHALLENGE
The ACI website was dated and inflexible. It no longer captured the essence of the ACI brand and had built up a fair amount of technical debt over the years.
SOLUTION
New Target created a flexible yet structured system to allow for content variety. User journeys were defined and the new site emphasized a positive user experience.
Strategy
Since ACI provides information to both the public and to the scientific community, they needed to parse and present the information for each audience in a way that was organic and inclusive for visitors who want to cross over from scientific to consumer information and vice versa.
Additionally, New Target’s audience analysis allowed our design and development efforts to provide a more personalized user journey for ACI’s various audience segments.
Design & Creative Vision
The goal of the website’s design was to modernize the look and create an efficient way for visitors to easily find what they’re looking for.
We wanted the site to feel “clean” and bright. While we avoided the use of product images, we focused on the results of those products by showing cleanliness and using soapy textures to provide a specific look that captured ACI.
The use of whitespace and intuitive graphics throughout the website separate content and piques visitors’ interest. A clear visual hierarchy allows visitors to find the content they need quickly.
Creating page elements that follow the page designs allowed us to create a flexible system that allows ACI the flexibility to create content that looks unique, while following a larger design guide. This can be seen throughout the site allowing images and color blocks to breakup pages and making content more digestible.
Development
The entirely new user-focused website is powered by Drupal and is built to provide website admins the flexibility to publish compelling content without limits.
We implemented Paragraphs to allow page flexibility creating more than 15 flexible paragraph types that can be combined to provide flexible page layouts. Additionally, we used Entity Embed which allows content to be embedded in the CKEditor and Color Field which enables color overlay and opacity to be set for each image. This approach gives admins even more opportunities to make Drupal work for them.
Given the amount of information on the website, we emphasized site search using Apache Solr to provide a custom experience. It starts with an “Ask Your Cleaning Questions” search on the homepage that includes auto-complete for popular cleaning questions and includes sticky search results and a robust filtering system to ensure users can find what they are looking for no matter how they look for it. To help users find what they need, we also use Search 404 to turn 404 pages into valuable search result pages.
The website uses several types of media to engage with visitors include media galleries, polls, and infographics.