Accelerating Project Delivery with WeShape's Tech Academy

Introduction:

Our client engaged WeShape’s Tech Academy to assist with project delivery on Flourish implementation, as well as providing additional support around other non-critical path tasks to optimise and improve platform performance. 

About Our Client:

Our client is a charitable branch of a global news company focused on specific areas of news reporting including climate change, technological impact on society, and more. 

The Problem:

Our client was looking at implementing Flourish to replace their legacy solution of data visualisation and make them easily accessible for journalists to use in articles. Their website and platforms needed to be optimised, leading to various issues like missing functionality, declining SEO, unnecessary properties and dependencies, and more. Some older components also lacked relevant tests, which allowed errors to go undetected during builds. 

Solutions:

• Flourish Implementation - Adding Flourish to the app and ensuring that the script for Flourish was only run once to maintain website efficiency; Linking to the CMS with additional documentation created for journalists to utilise the data visualisation solution
• Image Optimisation - Increasing Lighthouse score and optimising website loading time by fixing image component sizes
• Components Refresh - Creating a new image component for better loading times and prevent unnecessary properties from being used by legacy components. ; Adding focal points on images in dotCMS to allow more customisation on image use in articles
• Test Coverage - Utilising Cypress to ensure end-to-end tests are available for every component or modifying existing components to validate functionality
• TypeScript Update - Converting Javascript files to Typescript and enabling previously undetected errors to be caught and fixed 
  

Outcome:

• Website load times lowered by 20% along with overall improvement in web vitals due to the optimisation work conducted 
• Mobile performance enhanced as a result of the improved web vitals 
• Image components using fewer properties, allowing more lightweight images to be passed through the website, in turn allowing easy maintenance
• Client-side errors fixed where admin users sometimes experienced blockages while accessing the admin panel
• General RSS feed created to show the most recent news articles from the client's website.
• Thorough testing allowed a more robust application to be used and debugged should any functionality issues arise
• Positive feedback from users on the Flourish implementation and additional functionalities
  

Timeframe:

The Flourish implementation was conducted over six weeks, with the engagement extended for six weeks to assist with other platform optimisation work. 

Conclusion:

Through close collaboration with the lead web developer, WeShape’s Fast Tracker supported the Flourish implementation and carried out additional optimisation work on the client’s platform which addressed pre-existing issues, increased overall performance and provided quality-of-life improvements to the end users.