British Library collaborated with Coforge to improved accessibility and performance of its legacy website by 40%.
Overview.
The British Library wanted to modernize their website to make it more efficient, user friendly and scalable. To address this, a core team, led by Coforge carried out a pre-discovery session to understand the digital ecosystem and future customer needs.
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.
70000+
Pages were made Accessible and Responsive
30-40%
Overall website performance improved
50+
E2E reusable component library established
150+
Sitecore templates are now being produced by 1 single fully flexible FE template which means less cost to manage the website