Design and layout flexibility was a must
“The key challenge from an administrative point of view was that we needed an incredibly flexible setup”, Sophie Gray, Head Of Digital Delivery at Friend Studio explains. ”Each client is different, so we wanted to show different stories we are proud of: sometimes it’s the animation that matters, other times it’s a printed report, for example, a sustainability report we want to highlight. For each article and case study, we wanted to have complete control over the page layout so that we could display each piece of work in a custom format. This means that we needed quite a bit of flexibility and customization”, she adds.
“The Netrixlabs team were incredibly responsive: it took about two months for them to build us the frontend and the CMS behind it, we then just needed to populate it with our content”.
Friend Studio uses a lot of video, animation and large image assets across the website, including a large video banner carousel on the front page, so it was also important for these to load quickly.
Not a regular article-based CMS, but various modules to showcase work
“I’ve worked with a lot of CMSs in my life, but some colleagues have never used a CMS before, so it was important to have a user-friendly system. Everything made sense straight from the beginning – we just had a couple of sessions to set everything up exactly how we needed. Now it’s perfectly customized to our needs, and all editors can use it.”, Sophie Gray says.
Day-to-day, there are four main editors working with the site, which is updated weekly, including fresh imagery and animation. Technically, they do not have a regular article-based CMS but instead have various modules, depending on the type of content they need to work with, be it client logos, testimonials, reports or videos. “Luckily we do not need much support, everything works really well. We’re just getting ready for an upgrade, we wanted to make some typographic updates across the website and slightly modify some of the site features”, Gray adds.
Cost-efficiency was a key factor when choosing the iCMS
“Of course, as a company of 35 people, we don’t have the same scale of the budget as a large corporate might, so cost-efficiency was a key aspect when choosing Netrix. e They delivered great value for our budget, and we are very happy with the end result”.
In addition, Friend Studio will be launching another new digital project with the help of Netrixlabs next year, so stay tuned to check it out.
