ESP: website rebuild and data migration

Brief

Rebuild the existing site using a simple to use CMS and migrate all content including blog posts and talent profiles.

Context

ESP approached me to look at a solution in streamlining and fixing their website back-end, specifically the talent profile management section.

The site was built a few years back on a .NET MVC platform by another developer, and although the front-end of the site was still quite clean and easy to use, the back-end had become sluggish and problematic.

There were also aspects of the site that weren’t easily editable via the existing CMS, as well as major SEO concerns with URLs.

Solution

My solution was to retain the site’s look and feel and use WordPress to power all the sites content, from the basic pages, to dynamic sidebar components, and of course the talent profiles themselves.

To make this easy to use I implemented Custom Post Types for the case studies and talent profiles. Advanced Custom Fields were used to make the CPT template pages and back-end easier to use.

The Custom Post Types were setup manually via the functions.php file and I had to tinker with the permalinks to get search results and pagination working properly using CPT’s. The front-end was re-coded into a WordPress theme and adjusted accordingly.

I also rebuilt many Flash aspects of the original site into jQuery, such as the front-page talent slider which you can see above.