As a project manager, I take great pride in overseeing every aspect of a website project from start to finish. It’s a bit like raising a child. You nurture, guide, and watch it grow until it reaches its full potential. That’s why I am excited to be a part of The Toy Insider website redesign success.
Teamwork Makes the Website Redesign Dream Work
Throughout the project, our team was emotionally invested in the work because we understood the importance of the final product to The Toy Insider team. There were undoubtedly many challenges along the way. Still, our engineers approached each positively, drawing on their expertise and experience to craft customized solutions that best achieved this website redesign’s success.
Developed in collaboration with the Adventure Publishing Group, The Toy Insider project was ambitious. The goal was to combine three separate websites into one cohesive, user-friendly platform for editors.
Considering this challenge, the strategy, design, and development teams worked diligently to create a WordPress Multisite project to meet client expectations. Here are a few of the features we developed for The Toy Insider.
Page Building Flexibility with ACF Gutenberg Blocks
The Toy Insider team is not your typical client who gets a website built and forgets about it for five years. This publishing group comprises an ensemble of writers and editors who create daily content.
If you are familiar with writing content or creating pages, you know that not every page has the same needs. Yes, templates are great, but having the flexibility to add new or remove unnecessary sections is priceless.
Our development team created a list of 25+ blocks. These functions gave The Toy Insider team the flexibility to create different pages precisely as needed without a developer’s assistance.
This, combined with the latest WordPress features such as theme.json file and new block pattern templating, has given the team more control over Gutenberg’s default and custom blocks. As a result, creating content has become faster and more customizable.
And the excitement from The Toy Insider team was loud and clear.
They can now create a page using WP Core Blocks and combine them with the custom-made blocks we made for them using their brand guidelines and colors.
All Import Export Pro to Bulk Upload Products
The Toy Insider provides reviews and articles about, you guessed it, toys. This means their database is humongous. Managing such a large amount of data can be a considerable challenge. So they relied on a plugin to import and update their toys database on their old site.
However, with the updated functionalities of their new site, The Toy Insider needed a plugin that could support advanced features, including ACF. We recommended using All Import Pro, a trusted plugin WebDevStudios (WDS) uses with various clients to handle migration needs.
Our team met with Adventure Media’s Operations Manager, Bill Reese, to discuss the data structure required. Together, we created a template allowing the Toy Insider team to easily bulk upload products, including essential information such as product name, image, taxonomies, price, age range, and more.
With this database management solution in place, The Toy Insider could seamlessly manage their extensive collection of toys and make updating their database more efficient.
Gift Guide Taxonomies
The gift guide sections are another element of The Toy Insider website crucial to editors and readers. Every year, the Toy Insider editors curate gift guides for the different seasons their readers eagerly await.
On their old website, building each gift guide was an activity that required a lot of work—outside of selecting the toys that would be featured. WDS engineers crafted an architecture with taxonomies that allow the Toy Insider editors to easily choose the taxonomies they want to feature on each gift guide and tag the products to be featured. This, combined with the Gutenberg blocks I mentioned earlier, means that creating a gift guide can be done with a few easy clicks.
Data Migration and Mapping
Data migration was a critical aspect of the Toy Insider project, given the team’s extensive content catalog that included hundreds of articles per year with multiple authors, tags, images, and other related elements. Our data architects did their magic, utilizing their vast experience and expertise to ensure seamless migration to the new website.
The migration process was complex, but our team worked diligently to ensure that all the valuable data was transferred accurately and with the utmost care. The data architects carefully mapped out the new structure for the Toy Insider site and created a plan for moving the data according to that structure. They also worked closely with the Toy Insider team to identify any required modifications to the data import process, ensuring that nothing was lost or altered due to the migration.
Once the plan was in place, our team worked tirelessly to execute the migration, handling each element with the utmost care and attention to detail. Ultimately, our data architects’ magic touch ensured the migration was a complete success, and all the valuable data was migrated to the new website without any hitches. At WebDevStudios, we take data migration very seriously and have extensive experience handling even the most challenging projects.
Reliable Partners for Website Redesign and Rebuild Projects
As a project manager at WebDevStudios, I take pride in seeing a project through from start to launch. The recent development of Toy Insider’s website was no exception. Our team worked diligently to create a platform that would make the everyday activities of the editors easier.
We developed features such as flexible page building with ACF Gutenberg Blocks, the use of All Import Pro for bulk uploading products, and gift guide taxonomies to streamline the process for the Toy Insider team.
WebDevStudios becomes your partner when we work on your website project. From our strategists, designers, and project managers to engineers, we like to understand the ‘why’ behind what we’re trying to accomplish to provide the best solution to solve your problem.
If you’re looking for a reliable and experienced team to partner with, don’t hesitate to contact WebDevStudios to achieve your dreams of website redesign success.