Left
Delete
CLOUD MIGRATION
SERVICES
PRODUCTS
RESOURCES
All
Business Transformation

Global Mediator goes headless

August 2, 2022

Despite not being directly active in developing e-commerce solutions, we have just spent several months and some cash, building a completely new digital structure around our website using the latest technologies. Why has a distinguished IT company, with a decade-long track record in engineering business processes, ventured into what could be seen as overkill and launched a new website? Especially if they already had one – and a pretty decent one, frankly?

Well, as some people write on social media; it is complicated. Our site got hacked once, it was slow on loading, slow to refresh, and making new landing pages was a nightmare, and then some of our customers started building e-commerce based on the MACH alliance principles (short for Micro Services, API, Cloud, Headless). So, we decided that PHP belonged in our past and started looking for what our next step should be. This blog covers the marketing angle of our decision, whereas our next blog post will cover the technology angle.



What drives the change in marketing?

Actually, there were several reasons for this step. Chief amongst them was the realization, that Global Mediator had grown to 100 people in the business, and purely through word of mouth – people who knew people, or just knew us, would reach out to us. With a move to products in Microsoft AppSource and delivery of solutions using multiple technologies, we needed to support our sales with the ability to do much more inbound marketing – essentially, we needed to reorganize our marketing efforts around how we get to market and of course, our website was stuck in the past.

We simply understood that our changes as an organization needed a respective modern display towards our market. Our traditional, time-honoured website based on WordPress eventually proved too monolithic and rigid. With fresh eyes, our noble, yet a little outdated and slow site, subtly hinted at modernization. It lacked the possibilities and flexibility we needed.

We decided to create an entirely new presentation of Global Mediator - a more appealing, user-friendly, and easy-to-use website. We focused on providing the best user experience, including page loading speed, as well as an intuitive website menu. In terms of our internal operations, we needed a streamlined admin panel and a flexible system to deliver the visual part just the way we needed it. And a fast-responding one to check the changes made in the CMS straight away on the web.

A new chapter of Global Mediator’s story, wrapped into the new bold visuals



All our discussions started pointing in the direction of a flexible modular website backed by a headless CMS. A website that would embrace all the services in our focus into a single system and become our exclusive source of truth. Symbolically, we wanted the moment of launching our new website to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Global Mediator. Events around us delayed the launch a little, but it was indeed the right time to open a new chapter of Global Mediator’s story, filled with the most recent information about our services, products, and the technologies we harness – wrapped into the new bold visuals.

“We learn all the time and are not afraid of trying new things. Actually, we are eager to do that – that is the policy our teammates follow daily. That’s what we recommend our customers do – explore new technological possibilities. By launching a brand-new website based on the technologies that are totally new to us, we seek to practice what we preach.”



- Nicolai Krarup, COO at Global Mediator
What’s in it for the team?

Using a dated PHP site to promote how we apply innovative technologies within the Microsoft tech stack to deliver best-in-class solutions for our customers, just started to feel wrong – a little like delivering electric vehicles by using steam engines. The new website brings us very much up to the current era of marketing. For a company that invests in continuous learning to drive technological advancement and cloud development, taking our own medicine felt like the right thing to do.

It is fair to say that the Marketing team was both excited and a bit worried about the upcoming launch of the new website. The more website-related options we explored together with our partner, Slize Digital, the clearer we saw how naturally our endeavor matched with our commitment to keeping up with the latest technologies and the desire to better display the entirely new style of our external communication. So, the Marketing team, responsible for presenting the visual side of our technology expertise, eagerly engaged in the process.

We had a series of technical explorations together with Slize Digital that we will cover in the next blog post, but once the development part was finished on the Slize side, our Marketing team plunged right into the fascinating world of web page creation. Our team had to master this new instrument, which had given them full control over user experience, as well as preparing, locating, publishing, and editing content. But as they say, practice makes perfect. And probably for a good reason – it took the team less than two months to present Global Mediator’s entirely new image on 95 pages to our community.

Previously, with WordPress, building new pages meant providing a piece of content to a developer who then published it as per the standard page template after it had been tested. Today we can launch a new page in a matter of hours. As a result, our team feels a new sense of empowerment to realize creative ideas and commitments, and to transmit our branding identity in a new, brighter, more colorful, and faster way. Scaling and managing projects is way easier with the technological platform we are now leveraging. The team is ready to seize new opportunities, experiment, and try out new techniques for us to sound louder, look bolder and appear more relevant.

The cooperation was a fantastic joint project with our combined teams pushing a few envelopes to find out what was possible. Slize Digital explored new technologies while our new headless website helps us carve the new image of Global Mediator. And we totally embrace this change, and we will continue to change because building the new platform was only the first wave of our innovative way of information presentation. The new releases have a few more tricks up our sleeves – so stay tuned.

Subscribe to Global Mediator newsletter

Stay current with the latest insights from us