We've just built a website system for the fastest growing Fortune 500 company of the past decade.
Can you guess who they are? No, it's not Apple. In fact it's a company few of you will ever have heard of. Because why would you, unless you were buying fuel or logistics services for an aviation, shipping or trucking business. This multi-billion dollar monolith's name is World Fuel Services.
We call what we've built for them a website system, rather than just a website, as it enables WFD to build entire web pages from within the CMS without using a line of code. Built within Drupal 7, the system provides 20 content blocks, which can be configured in any order to create a page template, the content of which can then be added and edited as per a standard CMS. It's kind of like a bespoke Wordpress platform.
The content blocks range from maps and video players, to galleries and tables. And all of the blocks are configurable within themselves. For instance, the Form provides a series of dropdowns, free text fields and the like, for WFS to add and order; with all the data directed to the correct place within the back-end database, regardless of the configuration.
The project took eight months, which included almost three months to gather the requirements. But once we'd established what was needed, from all corners of this vast business, we moved into a fast-paced sprint-based methodology. Blocks were created, tested within page templates, then amended, as new blocks began their development cycle.
We delivered the system in May, and over the past few months the various arms of World Fuel Services have been feeding their content into it. There have been a few queries and additional requests during this time, but by and large we've had little to do. Which proves, hopefully, that the system is giving them the control and flexibility they demanded.
