Empowering Marketing Team
Veeve.com | Hospitality | UK
Website Revamp + Bespoke Design + CMS + Integrations
Enabling the marketing team with full control over content publishing, promotions, and campaigns through an intuitive & integrated Content Management System (CMS).
Veeve, a premier provider of luxury short-term holiday rentals, sought to revitalize their website and enhance visitor engagement. Collaborating closely with key stakeholders from their marketing, technology, and business teams, we not only implemented a bespoke responsive design but also developed a user-friendly content management system. This system enabled the marketing team to get full control over website management, seamlessly integrating with their existing booking engine and APIs from third-party platforms.
- Remote project delivery with an offshore team
- Bespoke development and seamless integration of design, CMS and APIs
- Drag-and-drop features to custom-publish web pages
Background
Since its inception in 2011, Veeve has been renting out hundreds of luxury homes in London and Paris while hosts were away. The website played a crucial role in attracting and interacting with users, as well as managing their tech-dependent business model.
By 2018, the site's design and features had become outdated, lagging behind competitors. For Veeve's marketing team, launching a simple landing page for high-performance digital campaigns took up to three months. Publishing a web page was a complex, time-consuming process involving multiple teams working on different platforms, with the technology team integrating their outputs. This inefficiency was costing the company valuable time in the marketing race.
Frustrated by the lack of essential features in the site's publishing mechanisms, the marketing team's ambitious plans were often delayed. Beyond a few text or image changes, modifying the site was a prohibitively tedious task.
Veeve needed a system where the marketing team had full control over content, design, and publishing, with the speed and autonomy required for swift campaign rollouts. Time was of the essence, and the more the marketing team depended on the technology or creative teams, the slower the campaign launches.
UIConnect, with its expertise in UX, technology, and digital marketing (crucial for the hospitality industry), was brought in to develop a new solution that would transform the website content publishing workflow.
Key Challenges
- The old Veeve website needed to remain functional during the development of the new site, requiring uninterrupted access to key transaction data and functionalities for development and testing.
- All features from the old site had to be replicated on the new one. The old site’s well-tested booking engine and APIs were retained, but integrating them into the new site's radically different technology stack was challenging.
- The new UX design required support for multi-device responsiveness, accommodating design and content variations across different media.
- The content management system needed to be intuitive, preferably with drag-and-drop functionality, and equipped with modern features to enable the marketing team to operate efficiently.
- The new site needed to match or exceed the speed of the original site, despite the complexity of a multi-stack environment and third-party plug-ins.
- The project had to be delivered and managed remotely.
Our Solution
"Working remotely on a large-scale, multi-stack, complex, and evolving offshore project requires a robust communication and client engagement plan. Relying solely on task management or resource allocation is too simplistic.
UIConnect has invested in tools and streamlined processes for effective client and internal communication. Each project is supported by a dedicated client management team, ensuring all stakeholders are aligned on scope, development processes, and expected outcomes. This approach has consistently led to successful project deliveries."
UIConnect has invested in tools and streamlined processes for effective client and internal communication. Each project is supported by a dedicated client management team, ensuring all stakeholders are aligned on scope, development processes, and expected outcomes. This approach has consistently led to successful project deliveries."
Swamy
Client Engagement
UIConnect
UIConnect
Our Solution
- UIConnect discussed mutual expectations and goals, creating a compact, phase-wise delivery plan. Dedicated teams were assigned to focus on CMS implementation and custom coding, UX implementation, and code migration.
- Dedicated staging and development environments with integrated version control were established. With development API access from the client, the team could conduct research, development, testing, and integration activities independently of the live server. This ensured business continuity throughout the new website's development until final migration.
- A separate server was established to replicate the existing technology stack and mimic booking and transaction functionalities, facilitating the development and testing of pre-existing features.
- An exclusive SharePoint extranet was established, providing full access to the client and working teams. Asana was used for project management, ensuring efficient task tracking and collaboration. Video communication channels were set up for daily and weekly progress updates and review calls.
- A specialized UX team in CMS implementation, page builder tools, and web development was assigned to convert Adobe XD UX prototypes. All functional and UX features were unit-tested across devices and resolutions.
- Code optimization activities were identified as a separate task and conducted at the end of the development phase. Measures included code separation and the use of site optimization plug-ins.
- Despite the details, we kept the big picture in focus. UIConnect's digital marketing experts guided the development team on SEO/SEM needs, ensuring alignment with Veeve's digital marketing strategy.
- During the handover phase, in addition to documentation, the UIConnect team arranged calls with the marketing and creative teams to ensure smooth knowledge transfer.
Result
In just seven months, UIConnect successfully migrated Veeve's entire site functionality, incorporating new features and adhering to Veeve's brand and new UX framework guidelines. The migration was executed with pixel-perfect precision across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, ensuring a seamless and enhanced user experience.
Success
- The marketing team at Veeve gained full control over the site, eliminating any dependency on the technical team for daily page edits or publishing.
- The time required for Veeve's marketing team to create, edit, or publish pages on veeve.com was drastically reduced from weeks to just few days.
- The new site outperformed the previous one in both speed and performance metrics.
- The choice of technology stack, coding approach, and selective use of third-party tools ensured the site was scalable for future needs.
