CertainTeed

The Challenge

CertainTeed is North America’s leading brand of exterior and interior building products known for innovation and sustainability. It’s owned by Saint Gobain, a 350 y.o. multinational corporation with $40b revenue and 180,000 employees. The company needed to build a website from scratch that would handle a multi-level catalog of products and lots of educational resources. 

S&F joined the development effort that had been started by another agency and eventually took on full responsibilities of building a scalable website with easily editable design, powerful search, and filtering options.

The Approach

S&F built a website for CertainTeed using Drupal with the intuitive Bootstrap 3 theme and leveraging the Features module. This module and its extensions allow configuration data to be checked, updated, and exported into a version control system. To automate workflows and gear up deployment processes, S&F used Acquia’s desktop local environment and cloud hosting in the early stages of development.

The Outcome

Thanks to Drupal’s innovative modules and APIs, S&F created a large-scale website that displays volumes of data with ease and provides a seamless navigation and UX. The team designed catalogs based on the product index created with the Search API  that allowed for greater flexibility and easier search index storing, and used The Better Mega Menu module to build a rich drop-down menu.

Additionally, S&F used powerful filtering mechanics for the product catalog, inspiration gallery, and the expansive database of educational materials. With integrated Drupal’s Views and Search API, and facet filters, wich help users narrow down their search, the website’s learning center lets visitors filter content by 7 different parameters and view the results in the form of an unlimited thumbnail gallery. 

Adopting a relatively new Drupal approach to web page design at the time, Paragraphs, allows the creation and reordering of an unlimited number of blocks with different content. This provides an easily editable, paragraph-driven approach to creating landing pages that contain a lot of information and link out to many different pages of the website, making the visitor journey as natural as possible.

Last but not least, powerful Google Maps API integration enabled helpful location-based functionality for website visitors. The system detects a user’s location by IP or browser request so that they can find contractors in a given radius.

The Secret Sauce

Crafting a content-heavy website has a lot of potential pitfalls related to loading time, UX, and other vital performance aspects. Choosing the right CMS and tech stack for complex projects is half the battle. S&F opted for Drupal and adopted its developer tools which provided the most value in terms of usability and scalability. Thanks to the right modules and APIs, the CertainTeed website provides a wealth of information and search options without overwhelming its visitors.

Interested in exploring what Speed & Function can do with your company? Contact us at letschat@speedandfunction.com