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Enterprise CMS re-platforming project:

This enterprise CMS re-platforming project revolutionised our sector leading clients operation, increasing every KPI of their core customer facing webstore overnight.

Sector.

Fitness & Leisure, Omnichannel Retail

Product description.

Enterprise headless CMS re-platforming solution

Technologies.

  • .NET Core 3.1
  • Angular 8.0
  • RESTFUL API
  • 3rd Party API Integration
%
Uplift in online sales
‘s
Admin hours saved per year
%
Increase in site performance
%
Improvement on search engine ranking

The challenge.

Upgrading an outdated, cumbersome platform.

Our longstanding client Parkwood Leisure (PL) is a specialist in developing and operating leisure facilities across the UK.

In a fast-paced online environment, Parkwood’s existing digital architecture and bespoke CMS had become outdated. Campaign and content management functionality that was once market-leading had become limiting, and search engine optimisation capability was now insufficient.

As Parkwood Leisure’s extensive portfolio grew to over 80 centres and sites, it needed a CMS that could expand with it and keep up with the demand of its complex and nationwide business model.

Alongside functionality restraints, the digital nature of Parkwood Leisure’s portfolio was being impacted by the challenge of maintaining a fine balance of implementing large-scale platform improvements, while ensuring the day-to-day online presence and performance of its business was not impacted by the associated downtime.

Ultimately, the existing solution was stunting Parkwood’s ability to grow and scale effectively as a business.

The solution.

Implementing an industry leading health and fitness ecommerce site.

After a six-month tender process, Magnolia was selected as Parkwood Leisure’s chosen partner. Magnolia’s flexible CMS solution is used by organisations including Nissan, Sainsbury’s, The New York Times and American Express, and is notable for its constant evolution and enhancements.

This behind-the-scenes innovation is key to its appeal, and allows the team at Parkwood Leisure to focus on getting the most from the platform, safe in the knowledge that CMS improvements and implementations are taken care of by Magnolia, with bespoke functionality and development provided by ioSTUDIOS. 

The platform integrates with Parkwood Leisure’s wider digital architecture – including the middleware solution, membership management solution and CRM – to provide seamless onboarding and allow for specific, accurate information for each leisure centre to pull through to the frontend for customers. 

The admin area of Magnolia CMS is simple and easy to use, as well as being flexible and adaptable for all users. This was important as Parkwood Leisure has a vast amount of employees who use the CMS, each with differing roles and levels of digital proficiency.

The look and feel of the new site was created using the findings of the award winning ‘Mace and Mentor’ research team, and  a comprehensive prototype was created by an ioSTUDIOS design specialist, providing a commercially positioned, best practice UX and UI that ensured Parkwood Leisure’s customers could seamlessly move around various journeys and content on the site.

As software development partner, ioSTUDIOS built, integrated, and implemented the final bespoke CMS solution using its tried and tested development process to complete the project on time, on budget and on schedule.

The result.

An overnight revolution providing a range of business changing improvements.

Since going live, the new platform has provided notable benefits to Parkwood Leisure.

From an employee perspective, CMS users can now manage their tasks easily and effectively, and create and publish new pages in minutes via an easy-to-use workflow approval system. This has allowed Parkwood Leisure’s central digital team to move away from admin and approvals to focus more on core initiatives included within their roadmap – including projects focussed around sales, retention and providing customers with a seamless and comprehensive digital offering that improves alongside the base technologies that support it.

Commercially, the new platform has led to an uplift in almost every digital KPI, as well as increases across a range of direct commercial and customer service indicators. This comes as no surprise as the platform provides a vastly improved UI interface, enhanced UX across all journeys, seamless integration across the Parkwood Leisure digital portfolio, an advanced SEO offering and significant increases in performance.

The project produced a truly business changing leap forward to Parkwood Leisure as an organisation – including a marked improvement in employee satisfaction by removing laborious manual tasks and snags. The accomplishment received acclaim from the industry, which was formally recognised at the prestigious ‘ukactive Awards’ as Parkwood Leisure won both the ‘Digital Transformation’ and ‘Outstanding Organisation’ of the Year awards.

ioSTUDIOS are a development agency that are flexible in their approach and have worked closely with us – acting almost as our in-house Dev Team – over a number of years, to provide best practice software solutions, advise and support.

They continuously challenge us and advise objectively, with the best interests of our organisations at heart.

SEAN ODGER

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