Mercia Group

The mission

Mercia are undertaking a huge modernisation effort to bring their website, CMS and e-commerce services up to a high modern standard that emulated and accurately portrayed the companies values and services.

MintTwist worked with Mercia to produce an advanced, Umbraco based CMS system capable of managing all content across the site, giving Mercia full control over their image and message to clients.

The site also integrates extensively with existing external Mercia database systems that hold important product information.

Data syncs daily between the site and the external systems that are used for taking orders via phone and providing support.

Online user orders also tracked and managed within the CMS and back-end system, providing access to the training resources for customers and teams.

The project continues into 2020 with the planned integration of other systems and business offerings.

Design

We overhauled the visual look of the website, playing to the strong Mercia brand. The team provided a fresh look with a strong emphasis on a solid user experience, keeping user journeys concise and clear.

The challenge was to reconcile all of the different types of content and various website use cases into a holistic and usable website design.

Umbraco

Mercia had pre-selected Umbraco as the foundation for the website based on the existing utilisation throughout the PLC.

The Umbraco specialists at MintTwist were able to utilise key CMS features during development in order to ensure that it was easy and quick for pages, content, products and orders to be managed via the admin area.

We extended Umbraco’s core functionality in order to cater for the the bespoke requirements of the project.

Technical excellence

With a large back-office team working online and offline, it was essential that the Umbraco CMS platform could talk to several internal Mercia systems in order to sync orders, products and users on a regular basis.

The team had to push Umbraco to its limits and optimise for regular data syncing routines, extensive product & page loading and back-end user training systems.

We worked closely with experts at Mercia to plan and develop a solution that gave their users an improved experience, and solved the issues that staff and users had with the existing website.

The result

We worked closely with Mercia throughout the whole project process and the result was a strong, visual website with a clear interface, overcoming the challenges of the complex content.