Transforming Britain's oldest brewer into a digital front-runner.

Client:
Shepherd Neame
Services:
Strategy, Discovery, Design, UX, Drupal
We designed and built a new website to reconcile Shepherd Neame's reputation based upon hundreds of years of tradition with their status as a modern, thriving and versatile brewer and pub company.

The brief.

Deeson was tasked with designing and building a site to showcase Shepherd Neame's updated corporate identity, integrate and streamline operating procedures, upgrade back-end systems, and give content editors more flexibility and control.

The site would also need to integrate the brewer's large digital estate of more than 300 pub microsites, so that content could be managed from one central location.

The results.

The site we built for Shepherd Neame aligns perfectly with their new brand identity, and has significantly strengthened their proposition and public perception in a highly competitive landscape.

We transformed the content editing experience, saving the team significant time and effort, and the integration between Shepherd Neame's multi-sites and main site means data can now be entered in a single place and shared across the entire estate.

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Shepherd Neame website screenshot

Project achievements.

80% faster on mobile.

Lightning-fast download speeds knocked bounce rates on mobile down by 7%.

Huge time savings.

It now takes under 10 minutes for Shepherd Neame to post a job listing, down from an estimated 1 hour.

Acquia Engage Awards 2017 Winner.

The site we built won best Brand Experience at the Acquia Engage Awards 2017.

How we did it.

We started by running a blueprint workshop with Shepherd Neame to record their long-term organisational and strategic objectives. We then conducted interviews with key internal stakeholders to understand the shape of the business, the challenges they face, who their competitors are, their long-term aspirations, and their current thoughts on the redesign.

The next phase of the project consisted of in-depth competitor analysis, a data and analytics review, user research, workshops, and identifying all the relevant systems that would need to integrate with the new site. With this research meticulously recorded in the blueprint document, we entered the ideation phase, developing wireframes and clickable prototypes for the client to test.

We adopted a component-led approach to building a Drupal 8 site that would provide Shepherd Neame's content team with the flexibility they required. The lightweight application management system we designed has federated access levels for all pub managers, allowing them to manage their data centrally and saving considerable time and money.