The Challenge
The website was becoming outdated, with maintenance issues and limitations constantly emerging. In addition, the site did not adapt to different devices/screen sizes and failed to meet AODA requirements for website accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA standards). A major update of the site was needed.
The Solution
Technical Consulting
Nerder provided alternatives on how to best address the site’s challenges. It was determined that the best plan of action would be a full rebuild of both the front and back ends as we needed to work from ground up. in order to create something stellar.
Responsive Design
The site’s design, content, and information architecture (sitemap), and most of the front end functionality were all maintained as-is. However, the website theme needed to be completely replaced in order to make the entire website “mobile first” (fully responsive), ensuring that the site would be usable on all device types and screen sizes. To do so, the Betheme theme was removed and replaced with a theme that we custom built.
Accessibility Compliance
New AODA regulations required the site to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards. With that in mind, we rebuilt the theme to be as accessible as possible. We then ran a full audit using a third party accessibility tool to ensure that the site meets the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. This audit also provides evidence that the required level of accessibility was met, mitigating potential threats of legal action.
Back End Rebuild
The entire website backend had to be rebuilt from scratch in order to make the site easier to maintain, improve site performance, and fix responsiveness and accessibility issues.
This included:
- All Pages were rebuilt using the Elementor Page Builder instead of the BeBuilder.
- Enforced better design consistency and standards throughout the site.
- Reduced the number of plugins, which would make the website faster and ultimately reduce the bounce rate.
- Cut down the number of Custom Post-Types by combining similar post types, in order to make the site maintenance easier and more intuitive.
The Result
The Advocis website is now much easier to update and maintain, performance has improved significantly (faster page load times), and coding issues have been fixed.
The site is also now fully responsive, providing excellent usability across a wide range of browsers and devices. The site also meets accessibility requirements, providing equal access to those with disabilities, while also contributing to better overall usability and better search engine rankings.
“I appreciate the ability to bounce architectural and technical options and concepts off the entire Nerder team to narrow down on the best build solution. Leveraging the extensive experience of the shop has several times provided a new and better way of solving our problems. At all times, Nerder supports our focus on exceptional customer outcomes.”