Implementing a completely rebranded website and new content model in 8 short weeks

In the fall of 2021, Beamery was planning a brand relaunch just in time for their yearly event Spark Live 2021.

While Beamery, as a tech scale-up, obviously has development talent aplenty, the marketing team needed dedicated resources to assist them with the new website. To make sure Beamery's IT team could keep their focus on product development, Two Point O was brought on board to handle the website.

With designs not yet finalised, a CMS that had to be set up from scratch again, and a very short project timeline, the challenge this project presented was quite big indeed.

How we tackled this challenge

Luckily, at Two Point O, we have excessive experience with Beamery's chosen CMS, Contentful. This allowed us to get a headstart on the content model despite the fact that design was not fully finalised yet when the project kicked off. The front-end developers aligned closely with Beamery's project manager and design agency to make sure everyone was working on the same priorities. This ensured designs were finalised and signed off by Beamery's management team in time for development.

Two Point O also focused the initial few weeks of the project on setting up the overall content structure, keeping pure design optimisations for further down the line. This allowed Beamery's content team to start putting in the website content already while development was still ongoing, cutting back on the overall project timeline.

A key point to note here is that Beamery also understood that a tight deadline meant that some functionality had to be shifted until after the initial go-live. The ‘kill-your-darlings’ principle is never fun but it is absolutely critical for a project with a timeline as short as this one, and Beamery understood the necessity of it.

The results of this project

Thanks to the overall pragmatic project approach, the extremely short communication lines between all parties involved, and Beamery’s clear priority-setting, the Beamery website went live in just 8 weeks. Development finished a couple of days before Spark Live 2021 to make sure the whole site could be tested thoroughly before sharing the new brand and website with all event attendees.

Some key takeaways:

New Contentful content model + front-end development finalised in just 8 weeks

Live with enough margin to test the website thoroughly before sharing it with thousands of people

Pragmatic project approach with very short communication lines

Post go-live plan for more advanced features in a continuous delivery project set-up

Close alignment with Beamery's IT to make sure everything fit into the existing ecosystem and with code reviews to make sure the quality of work was exactly as expected