Blenderdeval
The last of three generations of the site for Blender, a Spanish maker of vending machine products. Rebuilt on Drupal, which finally retired the custom CMS of 2009.
Five years and two rebuilds after the first version, the site was made new one last time, and this was the one that finally retired the CMS I had written for it in 2009.
How it started
Blender got in touch again, and this time the list was longer than a new look.
They wanted search traffic. The site had been built when that mattered less, and by 2014 being findable was the point of having it at all.
They wanted another design, and they wanted to stop asking me for changes that should not need a developer. News and articles configured rather than coded. Products with more behind them than a name, a picture and a price. Videos on the pages. Links out to the social accounts the company now had, which had not existed when the first version was written.
Read together, that was a brief my own CMS could not answer without me writing every one of those features by hand, and then maintaining all of them. Five years earlier that trade had been worth it. It was not any more.
Onto Drupal
So the site moved onto Drupal: content types for the pages, articles and products, blocks for the layout, and a theme built to match the company's brand.
That gave the client the configuration they had asked for. Products could carry the fields the range actually needed instead of the four I had guessed at in 2009, videos and social links were fields rather than template edits, and the news and articles were theirs to arrange.
It answered the SEO part too, which is mostly unglamorous plumbing: readable URLs, a title and a description they could write per page, headings in the right order and a sitemap that stayed current on its own. None of that is hard. All of it is work nobody wants to redo by hand on every site.
Going to a platform meant giving up the exact fit of a CMS written for this one site, and getting back everything that comes with not maintaining it: a known admin, an upgrade path, and modules for the things this site would otherwise have grown by hand.
And it meant the last of the Flash was gone, which by 2014 was less a decision than a deadline.
Status
This was the last version blenderdeval.com carried. The domain is retired.