Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Felipe Belgine (QA)
David Sachs (UX)
Fernando Mello Delgado (PM)
Janos Hovac (PM)
CI&T partnered with Acquia to leverage its Acquia Cloud Site Factory tool and build a new digital platform for Commonwealth, providing a totally revamped UX and mobile friendly web portal to more than 800 financial advisors.
Commonwealth Financial Network, the nation’s largest privately held independent broker/dealer–RIA, supports more than 1,650 independent financial advisors nationwide, providing industry leading tools, resources, and support allowing affiliated advisors to run their business their way.
Among the large set of tools and services that Commonwealth provides, customizable websites are an important marketing and communication channel for their advisors, playing a key role in their businesses. Based on advisor feedback, and Commonwealth’s commitment to providing the most intuitive and efficient technology, the firm sought an overhaul of its advisor websites platform.
Commonwealth chose CI&T based on their extensive knowledge and experience with site builder platforms, and based their shared culture of pushing the technology envelope.
About the project
The main goal was to deliver a new digital platform for building and maintaining websites, improving usability, flexibility, mobile friendliness and providing a more robust digital platform.
These sites need to promote the small business behind the scenes through effective search engine optimization, and be built on a platform that would be easy to enhance over time.
Within 3 months, the team delivered the MVP, an important milestone for the project, featuring the viability of all critical functionalities.
The results:
- A powerful site builder, incredibly easy to use, with several customization options.
- Ability to quickly fire up new web sites with revamped functionalities and look and feel, and with very little manual intervention or maintenance
- Time to market: 50% faster website development
- Visibility: Better SEO results
- Scale: over 800 websites being migrated to the new platform
- Optimization: 5 team members to serve 1,900 advisors
- Commonwealth Financial Network reported many improvements over the previous solution, which helped them fulfill the major strategic goals set during its inception.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal has been chosen due to its high customization power along with its strong and active community. CI&T relied on many of its out-of-the-box features while developing a final touch of custom code to adapt quickly to Commonwealth’s advanced requirements.
Thanks to Drupal the development effort was significantly reduced, allowing CI&T to meet the aggressive development deadlines set up for the engagement.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Lightning Distribution was used as a base for the project thanks to its advanced and powerful content edition improvements.
Bootstrap Theme (including the Bootstrap CSS Framework) added all the responsive support needed along with many custom HTML and CSS components, and awesome javascript plugins.
Panels and Panopoly were key modules to provide the flexibility for users to create pages. Using a variety of page layouts (1 column, 2 columns, sidebars) users can select the most appropriated layout to accommodate their content.
For the entire development flow, Features module comes in handy to keep the system configuration in code and help us to deploy code quickly.
Services module helped us to create an extremely important internal API. All the sites are able to exchange data in order to keep the system synced.
Sweaver module also provided a powerful customization tool for the platform themes. Users are able to switch between the available themes, apply specific CSS tweaks as well as use different color palettes.
