Previously in this series, Gigi Anderson, Senior Marketing Communications Specialist at Acquia, talked about the content migration for website redesign. Catch up and read Gigi's blog, here.
At the outset of our site redesign project, there were a few core principles we vowed to stick to. One of the biggest undertakings, but arguably most important, was to utilize as many of our own products as possible. Not all of our tools would have a practical application on the site, but some of them, such as Acquia Lift, would help us to deliver a superior digital experience on par with what we already deliver for our customers.
Lift is our personalization tool, which aims to deliver contextual content throughout a user’s journey. It captures data from users who are visiting your site, and sends that data into Profile Manager - the data warehouse that stores all user information and analytics data. Although Lift 3 is more robust and user-friendly than ever, it hasn’t always been the belle of the ball.
Historical challenges with Lift 2
With Acquia.com running on Drupal 7, we experienced some challenges with Lift 2. The campaign building process was a manual one, and while the workflow was logical, it felt clunky and stale. The interface was functional and helped us to achieve personalization goals, but it was a lengthy process to build new campaigns. Logged-in users also experienced poor performance, which meant that we often had functionality turned off on Acquia.com.
Lift 2 was built with many different Drupal modules and sub-modules, so it was entirely Drupal-dependent. In order to deploy a new campaign, you’d have to build out the segments and parameters ahead of time, before previewing your work on the live site. Any changes made would require the campaign to be paused, before going into the backend, updating parameters, and then previewing again. It was a workable process, but far from ideal.