Consolidating a sprawling digital estate into one global platform

The French engineering group Egis delivers infrastructure projects globally, from the Paris metro line extension to stadiums in Cameroon. Offering consultancy, engineering and delivery services across sectors, the international group has set out its new strategic vision and ambitious growth plan for the next decade.

Its ageing corporate group site and extended web presence clearly no longer reflected what the business had achieved and where it was headed.

The opportunity

Egis turned to Tangent to help consolidate 20+ country websites and spin-off thematic sites that had been developed throughout the years. This sprawling estate not only became more unmanageable, but fragmented the user experience and prevented the business from showcasing one aligned vision of themselves. These legacy sites were also built on technology that was imminently going to be retired, so they needed to act fast to not compromise their digital presence.

Defining requirements at a global scale

We embarked on a discovery phase with the business to better understand some of the biggest challenges they were looking to overcome, both on a global and local level. We held 20 one-on-one stakeholder interviews to capture specific needs across departments, sectors, and regions. We audited regional and thematic sites to understand how users were currently flowing through the current presences and potential content requirements for the new solution. We spoke to procurement specialists and potential talent to get insight on content hierarchy and help define information architecture.

This helped formulate and align the global team on a brief that addressed all needs in a prioritised way.

Global presence, local content

It was clear to us that the solution we put forward needed to give local markets an opportunity to manage their presence in a way they knew their audience would respond to. The design system we created provided the flexibility the markets were looking for, whilst creating consistency in the overall global user experience. We also supported the group with a complete content and copywriting overhaul to deliver a unified tone of voice on more than 70 key pages across the site.

Pushing the digital brand further

As part of this programme of work, we had the opportunity to revisit the existing brand guidelines and put forward an enhanced brand presence for the web. We created new brand elements to give it a much more modern and confident look & feel, as well as considered structural UI elements across the new site components.

Tech

We took a progressive JAMStack approach to the Egis project; which standards for JavaScript, API and Mark-up.

Firstly the JavaScript element of the stack, we built a decoupled frontend application in React using Next.js, which is responsible for pre-rendering. Next.js also handles image optimization and localisation routing. As the frontend is a decoupled application, it means we can independently scale it and handle high volumes of global distributed traffic. The frontend application also integrated with Umbraco’s Headless CMS Heartcore. The CMS provides web content, media and dynamic forms usings a GraphQL API. Umbraco Heartcore is a managed service provided by Umbraco themselves, meaning they take care of the support, maintenance and patching.

As previously mentioned Next.js is responsible for pre-rendering, which is the Mark-up element of the stack. This means the DOM (Document Object Model) or HTML/CSS is prebuilt and stored with the Node server running React/Next, compared to the traditional approach where the DOM is compiled on request to the server. As a result we benefit from blistering quick performance and increased security. This almost decreases the carbon footprints of the application as it takes significantly less energy to generate server pages compared to traditional monolithic applications.

Lastly, the API element of the stack, where we took a microservices approach. This means we have lots of individual applications with single responsibilities, then can individually scale and be worked on. These were all exposed by a RESTFUL API Gateway. Also where possible we have used serverless functions to host our services; this means we only pay for the resource we use meaning our API compute resource is extremely cost effective. We are a cloud-first organisation; we hosted the system in Azure using Platform as a Service (PaaS) services. PaaS means that the infrastructure is supported, maintained and patched by the provider which is this case in Microsoft. PaaS is also a green way of hosting systems.