British Library collaborated with Coforge to improved accessibility and performance of its legacy website by 40%.

Challenges.

The British Library has been facing usability challenges with its website that involved issues around accessibility, legacy code.

Key Challenges

• Inaccessible legacy website(Accessibility Regulations)
• Poorly managed legacy code developed by multiple vendors
• Potential to improve user experience

Solution.

A high-level prototype was built initially to prove the accessibility and performance improvement brought by the headless architecture implemented by Coforge. The following website development stages were planned and executed:

• Usage of Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS) for generating configurable JSON.
• Consumption of dynamic JSON through React JS.
• To retain SEO rankings, it was ensured that URLs of old and new website run in parallel.
• Custom JSS preview was developed by extending the vanilla Sitecore solution.
• Legacy out-dated code was transformed to a whitelabelled website along with making the same AA level accessibility compliant
• Full User Experience (UX) design of all unique Sitecore templates to support different screen resolutions.
• A responsive website was built supported by the single code base, replacing a separate legacy mobile website.
• Both legacy and new accessibility were enabled to run in parallel to enable a phased roll-out of the new website.
• On-going component library was built along the development phase which is being re-used in all the new web projects within the Client’s organization.

The impact.

New and more productive ways of working were introduced to the Client’s leadership team and delivery organisation, showing how new solutions can be quickly designed and prototyped to gain rapid, low-cost user feedback.