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Freeborn, a full-service law firm, sought a mobile-first, engaging experience on Drupal 8.

With 130 attorneys in five offices, Freeborn had grown exponentially since their Drupal 7 site build, and a design refresh made a lot of sense with the migration to Drupal 8.

We wanted to highlight not only the attorneys and areas of focus but also the valuable content generated by Freeborn in multiple formats.

The discovery process included stakeholder interviews, analytics review, and content inventory to verify user targets and outline goals and objectives for the new site. At the end of this phase, interactive wireframes were created to demonstrate and verify recommendations before moving forward.

About the project

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Project Highlights

Content Migration

We consolidated five content types into one and built new taxonomy relationships.

Flex Pages

Flexible components allow for dynamic, engaging page creation to fit the client’s needs. 

Attorney Profiles

New content strategy for attorney bios elevates thought leadership content while being flexible for content editors to customize each bio. In addition, the design team provided art direction for new photography of all attorneys and professional staff.
 

Mobile-First

Taking advantage of responsive design, the new theme and site structure are optimized to make the mobile user experience intuitive. 

Bold Design 

By expanding the use of photography, and strategic use of the brand colors and typography, the new site design gives Freeborn a bolder online brand presence. 

Content Relationships

Display news and insights on relevant attorney bios and practice pages to surface Freeborn thought leadership content.

Streamlining Content Types

Restructured taxonomy and content types simplify the content creation process for editors to add new content to the site.

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Development Challenges and Solutions 

Flexpages 

Freeborn’s content managers asked for flexible tools to create dynamic, branded pages, without writing a single line of code.. 

Our Flexpage components, based on the Paragraphs module, provide structured layout tools to make it easy to add imagery, video, slideshows, tabs and more to build engaging pages. Components include customized configurations to let content creators apply colors, type formats and other branded elements.

Now the team can build custom, branded landing pages that can be targeted for specific users and help with SEO.

Migration

Like any older site, the Drupal 7 version had some technical debt and some redundant content types that made content management much more complex. 

The migration to Drupal 8 gave the development team a chance to combine 5 content types into one, while maintaining and optimizing the taxonomy relationships. This meant the content managers would only have to manage one content type versus five. The optimization of taxonomy also improves how content can be displayed automatically on attorney and practice pages.

Accessibility

In addition to a design refresh, a key project requirement was to be sure the site was accessible to all users. 

An important benefit of using Drupal is the community’s focus on accessibility both on the front end and administrator interface. The Mediacurrent team spent additional time to ensure that key elements like navigation and search are fully accessible. This included using or improving accessible contributed modules, adhering to coding best practices, a bit of javascript where necessary, and verifying color contrast meets WCAG 2.1 standards.

Note: Work for Freeborn was completed by Duo Consulting Inc., which became part of Mediacurrent in 2020. Read more about the acquisition.

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Why Drupal was chosen

  • Mobile First: Fully responsive out-of-the-box with built-in support for responsive images.

  • Content Migration: Ability to migrate and combine content, while maintaining critical existing taxonomy relationships.

  • The power of views: Easy aggregation of thought leadership content and ability to display relevant content on practice and attorney pages.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • Apache Solr for site search: Search for attorneys, topics, keywords and return structured, intuitive results.
  • Paragraphs module: Using the Paragraphs module as a foundation, Flexpage components give content managers intuitive, powerful content layout tools.
  • Views module: This site uses Views to display a list of attorneys on each Practice page, and list Practices for each attorney bio automatically. We also use Views filters and sorting to display the most recent news and events. This takes the burden off of content managers so they can focus on creating impactful content.