A Partnership Dedicated to Umbraco Best Practices

In a perfect world, there are no deadlines, no budgets, and no worries. In the world of web design and development, these are just dreams: our work is defined by doing great work on a tight deadline, and our recent work alongside Flint Group was just that: helping provide great work on a tight deadline to their national health insurance client.

This wasn’t just any tight deadline, either: this was an open enrollment date — a hard date that would result in a sudden and heavy increase in traffic. To add to the issues, the client’s existing Umbraco site needed some intense clean-up and restructuring.

We had three months before product launch, and we were on the case.

While Flint Group jumped in to tackle the organization of content and site clean-up, Blend got to work turning front-end HTML and CSS into a fully functioning solution within their existing Umbraco instance. Working with an existing site — and within the confines of an existing design — can be a challenge: there’s a need to balance existing technical and design debt with the project’s direction. A common understanding between all partners — and realistic expectations around the final product — helps dampen that challenge and provide a better overall project.

Blend’s development team worked from general to specific, tackling major content types and blocks in the first sprints, followed by more specific and one-off blocks as the project moved on. This was done to manage content entry and provide a kind of “minimum viable product,” knowing if any snags sprung up we’d still have the important pages handled for launch.

And, as the three partners neared launch, Blend helped navigate a fourth partner: helping coordinate both a third-party hosting solution as well as a reorgannization of the current Umbraco model. With these four teams working together, the client was able to move forward with a content model that facilitated future phases.

Was the work successful? Yes. After all, collaboration is a difficult endeavor, and we worked toward a common goal with ease. And, the site was up on time and ready for open enrollment: a win for everyone involved.