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ÖBV

To everyone who has been attending school in Austria, the Österreichischer Schulbuch Verlag is well known. The majority of Austrian pupils uses educational books and learning materials provided by this well-established publishing house, which has been founded by Maria Theresia in the first place and is now part of the German Ernst Klett Verlag.

The organically grown website is getting a bit long in the tooth. Therefor, in the early stage of the project, the goal was to relaunch the whole website including the shop in order to meet the customers’ changing requirements as well as the technical standards (responsive design, intuitively used CMS, new product groups and displays, content of teaching etc.) and to facilitate the system’s landscape.

The Relaunch

About 7 months we worked closely together with the OEBV project team on the go-live of the first stage of expansion. In this stage, the corporate website, the web shop as well as the connection with essential interfaces (publisher system, ERP, CRM, DAM, SBX, print offices etc.) were implemented. Deliberately, we looked out for the frontend and backend development separately in order to maximize maintainability and system stability. Concerning frontend, we chose to work with a living styleguide that allows technical documentation (HTML, CSS, JS) for all components, that are simply composited to site prototypes in the next step. So the footprint is held small, thus performance increases.

For the backend we used the open source CMS Drupal 7, a system with an ideal basis concerning scalability, excellent performance and extremely high security standards, which are necessary for this heavyweight of a website. By integrating the webshop seamlessly by using the Drupal Commerce module, the customer journey got optimized as to generating leads and conversions.

The Implementation

By agile development we prioritized features and milestones in the backlog and tested automatically and manually after implementation in order to grant a high quality code. Continuous integration, continuous delivery and deployment workflows enable changes in the codebase efficiently and therefor accelerate the development speed. So release cycles could be decimated as well. For years, Zensations has been counting on the renowned SaaS providers Acquia and Platform.SH. After one year of development, the go-live went smoothly and we were able to concentrate on the next big thing: more features.

+34%

Increase in average time spent on website

+27%

lower exit rate

10%

Increase in conversion rate

To Be Continued…

A project this size is never finished, it’s a continuous process of further development and optimizations. Since 2016 many more features, content types and connections for external systems have formed the site’s infrastructure. For example, a modular system for landing pages containing diverse widgets based on paragraphs has been developed. This way, editors are offered a new spectrum of possibilities to publish their content.

In order to support the company’s digital strategy in the best way possible, we implemented a connection to the Arvato licensing management system (Bertelsmann) for digital products (SaaS). By SSO (single sign-on) the user is able to actuate digital products directly and conveniently. We are looking forward to many more interesting projects to come and realize together with OEBV.

Summer 2015 – now