The Challenge
Glen Dimplex Heating & Ventilation sell products under 10+ different brands across Europe, and in multiple languages. Building and maintaining that many brand sites would be a costly affair - let alone the additional sites for customer support, resellers and GDHV themselves.
They needed something that would bring all those sites up to date, while introducing significant cost savings.
Sites upgraded
Cost saving through multisite setup
Brand recognition with common "look and feel"
Our Solution
We committed to a multisite installation as the ideal route forward for GDHV.
A Multisite installation runs multiple separate sites, but from a single central collection of site code. It’s a very common implementation of Drupal, as it allows for sharing of functionality and configuration - but also individuality where required.
The cost savings compared to over a dozen separate design and build projects would be enormous, and the long term benefits from administrative and editorial consistency, reduced security risk exposure and faster maintenance would go on to further cement the platform in the good books.
Careful planning
Discovery phases bring important data to the project
A multisite platform for so many sites requires well-considered decisions on per-site branding flexibility, configuration separation and feature design.
We led a Discovery Phase with the GDHV team, to refine and clarify the actual functional needs of the various sites and ensure we allowed flexibility in the right places and enforced restrictions as appropriate.
Key outcomes included:
- Maintaining individual brand personality
- Support multilingual experience for some sites
- Some internal tools could be built on the platform, too
Benefits across the continent
Operating across Europe, the GDHV umbrella runs numerous brand sites in different countries - and different languages too. Several use Drupal's powerful language handling to serve multiple languages and countries across the Nordics, yet remain firmly founded in the same platform.
Coalescing all of these sites into one single, flexible system brought the benefits of the new platform to millions of potential customers and thousands of staff and internal users.
16 Sites
Multiple brand sites joined the platform, plus Customer Service platforms and internal services well-suited to the Drupal ecosystem
10+ Languages
With brands spread across Europe, numerous sites were either not in English or had multiple languages
10+ Countries
Most brands in the GDHV group moved to the new platform
Brand recognition, but with a common “look and feel”
There's huge value in retaining the "essence" of each brand across a portfolio, and it was vital that the new system preserved the unique qualities of each. Our Discovery Phase identified the most important ways that brands would want and need to express themselves. The result was a single central theme that standardised a lot of the layout and site theming, but left plenty of space for brands to make their web space their own.
Standardised experience
Thanks to the centralised CMS and shared theming, customers and staff across Europe benefit from a standardised web experience across the GDHV brands sites and internal sites. That's a huge win for customers, who can navigate and interact more seamlessly, and for the web teams too - editors, managers and administrators have a familiar and well-understood CMS to work with, no matter which site they're working on.
An improved UX for both customers and internal teams? Double win!
Fast updates and developments
Everyone involved benefits from having a shared single codebase. It's easier to work with a well-structured multisite platform, which in turn means both lower maintenance costs and faster development for changes and new projects.
As site maintainers, we can work more quickly knowing the sites are actually very similar and not awkwardly different (by careful design!). And having just one set of code to update when security updates are made available means we can update, test and release super rapidly, keeping all the sites secure.
A successful multisite upgrade
After all was said and done, the client was very happy with the results.
Whilst money isn't everything, the financials were a key motivator for the project and performed well.
Costs remain low and the platform has served well for several years, cementing further savings day in, day out 🌟