CI&T Takes Its Website Global with Drupal

CI&T is a digital specialist that delivers business impact with strategy, design and engineering services.

Why Drupal was chosen: 

A website should be more than just an attractive hub for a company’s services. CI&T’s strategy behind their new global website is to include messages that support both their brand and support their growth that allows for autonomy for their teams across the globe. Three essential pillars were set in order to sustain the project: security, accessibility and publishing autonomy for the team.

The project required easy customization, creation and editing of content, giving total flexibility and allowing for self-sufficiency for the teams while keeping brand consistency.

Drupal was the tool of choice because of its CMS framework. It allows for the utilization of community projects like views, paragraphs, bootstraps, and others which makes it more efficient and easy to create pages and websites. CI&T has been a long-time Drupal partner and user, with a team of over 300 Drupal experts and having developed and managed the most Drupal sites, it was an obvious choice.

It is often the best solution for complex, content-heavy, and high-traffic websites, as well as those with large resource libraries and databases. Drupal is extremely powerful, flexible, functional, and secure which suits large and complex projects.

As an open source platform, it has a large user community which regularly contributes to repositories like GitHub. By virtue of the sheer numbers of developers and designers working on Drupal, there is a broad knowledge base contributing code and participating in Drupal groups on LinkedIn, Subreddits, and more. Because of this, there is always an answer to your next Drupal question.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

To consolidate the CI&T brand as a global brand, a major challenge came to light: to redesign the CI&T website. Or rather, the CI&T websites in order to create one, true global site that showcases its international presence.

Before the launch of the new site in 2020, CI&T managed 5 websites, each one catering to a different region, totally separate and disconnected from each other, with its own structure, positioning and varying visual treatments.

CI&T structured a multidisciplinary team to carry out the great mission of unifying the CI&T brand under one site as it is one of the most relevant contact points for the brand.

For the kickoff, the team ran interviews with several people from different disciplines and locations, including People (HR), Global Growth Partners or “GGP” (Branding), IT teams and executives, in order to understand the whys of a global site, regional differences, must haves and nice to have, in addition to collecting insights for structuring the project. As part of the research 8 companies with global sites that compete and/or work similarly to CI&T, were used as benchmarks, in order to understand how the market approaches this type of platform.

Since CI&T is present in several countries, the site is based on the premise that it should include different regions and different languages. In addition to having the then current markets of Brazil, United States, Japan, China and the United Kingdom to the global site, CI&T also had to plan for upcoming markets: Canada, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand, resulting in five central languages: English, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese.

After identifying which markets were essential for launch, CI&T defined Drupal as a content management platform for the site, and more specifically, Gutenberg, a promising content editor within Drupal that would allow greater flexibility and agility for content publishers.

Regarding design - the key to unifying the CI&T brand globally - A set of design principles were defined, which helped guide the choices beyond the visuals: globally consistent, dynamic and adaptable, universal and diverse and message first, culminating in the creation of a design system basis for the entire look & feel of the site, consistently standardizing and scaling the way colors, typography, buttons, icons and other interface elements that reinforce our globality across the site were used. And not only that, this process was so valuable that it ended up impacting and reflecting on the way we visually and globally communicate the brand in our other channels, in addition to the website.

Another extremely relevant point in the process was content. During the site redesign process, CI&T teams were able to unify their global messaging by working collaboratively with different teams around the world. 

In addition, CI&T's websites have always intended to be a great hub and propagator of knowledge, with hundreds of articles, podcasts, webinars and more published. We sort all content by language, topic, services and industries, and together with the filtering functionality designed for the new site, we have built a growing library with more than 2,000 CI&T content that is easily navigable and consumable.

Another major evolution that came with the global website was the integration of Lever, a recruitment tool used by the People (HR) team, making the flow of publication and announcement of job openings on the CI&T website more efficient.

The structure and features of the new website allows site management to be scalable, the creation of new pages to be extremely agile, provides autonomy for local teams, creates an improved browsing experience, as well as presents a globally consistent design and message in relation to the business, market and our culture.

In December 2020, the CI&T global website went live, going from 5 different and disconnected websites to a single global website with 9 regions and 5 languages, placing the website as an essential channel for our brand platform and consolidating CI&T as a single brand, a single company, a single CI&T around the globe.

Impact numbers:

-83% (from 12 to 2)
Hours taken to put a beautiful page live

+214% (from 27 to 85)
Organic Search Performance Score

4000+
New leads generated via the website so far

50
Components and modules created

Quotes:

"The global website was a very challenging endeavor. So we wanted a website that was able to give the regions the ability to move fast and to produce content and push content super fast and with autonomy, but at the same time, we wanted a certain consistency of the brand across the globe, right? So we wanted that the website in Japan to look similar to the one in the US, and then the one in Brazil and so on. Those two things are hard to reconcile so I think that was the biggest achievement of the team who took upon themselves the challenge and went through the alignments and put together the structure that now everyone can use with agility and autonomy and create great things on the website. It just looks really good and it really portrait CI&T in a good way, it transmits that we are a big, elegant, global company" - Bruno Guicardi - President, Co-Founder at CI&T

"CI&T’s website is a very important tool in Europe. It helped us with hiring and also with job fairs, especially those that we are sponsoring, it is very important to have this tool to present CI&T’s view, culture, case studies and usually the candidates here, every time they come to the interview, they talk a lot about what they have seen on the website. So it continues to be a very powerful tool of attracting new candidates and help us with the employer branding." - Tania Franco Marques - HR Manager at CI&T