TechRaptor Landing Page Redesign

iTech4Web brought a top-down design strategy to the project, segregating the content first into two categories — video and tabletop games — and creating easily understood visual icons to tag each category. Then, each different type of content within a category (such as News, Guides, Reviews, Opinions, etc.) was tagged and colour-coded to achieve an instantly recognizable matrix of content.

With a just-right (not too complex) content taxonomy in place, the development of a Component-based Design for the homepage got underway. Using two Drupal modules, Layout Builder and Entityqueue, iTech4Web created a custom solution for TechRaptor’s homepage that allows Rutledge and his editing team to easily and visually create and style content blocks for various areas of the homepage. These content blocks can then be placed on the homepage as the editing team sees fit and rearranged seasonally or as special thematic events arise. Rutledge was impressed saying “I was pleasantly surprised at how easily Drupal’s component-based solution can be utilized by my staff.”

When Rutledge saw how effective the Component-based Design was on the homepage, he wanted to have that capability for other landing pages as well, but that wasn’t in the scope of work for the project. Without significant modification to the project budget, the iTech4Web team figured out how to extend their solution, enabling the TechRaptor team to use the Component-based Design solution on the landing pages as well. “We love the flexibility Drupal gives us to cost-effectively serve our client’s needs,” says Dima Storozhuk, the founder of iTech4Web, “even when they don’t know exactly what they need at the beginning of the project.”

🗻Challenges

• A decade of quality content was disorganized and somewhat impenetrable, especially for first time visitors.
• Homepage design was static, stifling editors’ creative ideas for updates.
• Navigational menus were not facilitating a great user experience, and not enough content was surfaced on the homepage.

🎯Solutions

• Content was organized with several visual elements that make the content taxonomy clear to site visitors at a single glance.
• A custom Component-based Design solution using the Layout Builder and Entityqueue modules was implemented to give creative freedom to site editors using no-code, drag-and-drop functionality.
• A new navigational structure was created for the site that provides more access to the content, and far more content can be surfaced on the homepage than was previously possible.