What can you tell us about the team that built firmex.com?

The Firmex site was a collaboration between Firmex themselves, Messenger Design and FortySeven Media. Firmex did much of the heavy lifting in terms of research, wireframing, scope and content creation while Messenger did all the design. FortySeven Media did the HTML/CSS and ExpressionEngine work.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

The goals for the Firmex site were focused around four key objectives: 1. Improve the logical use of the space on the site to increase usability for the visitor. 2. Improve the Firmex brand identity to be reflective of who they were as a company and who the customer Firmex sells to. 3. Improve marketing capabilities by enabling for use with Hubspot forms and Google A/B Testing. One of the key aspects of this was generating content – lots of it and quickly. 4. Firmex needed the site to be intuitive and easy to use on the backend without sacrificing power or customization.

Firmex’s audience was two-fold – those who they sell to (Lawyers, Investment Bankers, Corporate Executives) AND those who they want to come work for Firmex.  The main objective of the improvement in brand identity was to mesh those two audiences together – while they’re serious about the services they provide their customers, they’re a great workplace because they are focused on engaging their people (fun being one of the ways they do that).

What was your major consideration in using ExpressionEngine for this?

The same reason we use ExpressionEngine for everything we build. It’s powerful, flexible and gets out of your way. We were able to easily integrate the custom design and build out all sorts of complex functionality while maintaining a simple and straightforward control panel experience. Firmex now enjoys making updates to the site and are able to generate lots of content like landing pages and blog entries.

Were there any Commercial Add-ons that proved useful? If so, which ones? How did they help?

There are quite a few Add-ons in use on the site, but we couldn’t have built it without the power punch combo of Structure, Matrix, Playa and Wygwam. Structure is the foundation of the site and gives Firmex an easy access point to all of their pages. Using Matrix and Wygwam and several other field types they can literally change the layout and content on just about every page. With Freebie we were able to define breaking points in the URL segment and let them pass reference URL’s into Hubspot forms to track how visitors get to their action pages. We also used it to let Firmex create alternate versions of pages for A/B testing while retaining navigation highlighting.

Did you do any custom add-on development?

Nearly everything was out of the box, but Jack McDade did add a hook to Structure for us for A/B Testing. With the help of Tom Jaeger we have since made some modifications to Freebie and created at least one custom plugin. Everything else is native.

What is next on the plate for firmex.com? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

Since the site launch, Firmex loves ExpressionEngine so much that we converted their WordPress blog and moved it off to a subdomain into the main EE site. This gives a huge benefit of only maintaining one system, better SEO and better integration throughout the site. We’re also currently working on moving their private support site from WordPress to ExpressionEngine.

Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community? Tips from this project you’d like to share? Lessons you’ve learned?

First of all, take the time to think through not just your template build out, but how easy it will be for the client to manage on the backend. Our conversations with Firmex didn’t just deal with client side functionality, but also what that meant for them in terms of maintenance. As a result, they really enjoy using the system and are recommending it to others. We learned a lot about getting A/B testing setup with Structure as well as well some of the steps you need to go through in migrating from WordPress to ExpressionEngine. We also found out a few tricks for using categories and pagination with Structure. You can read about the A/B setup  and the category tricks.