TestingTime

TestingTime wanted an easy and flexible way to publish and manage their content. Their website was previously implemented in Angular which brought an unneeded layer of complexity to a content publishing workflow. We use and love Angular but, given the project brief, WordPress came out as the clear winner for taking their publishing experience to the next level since it gives more control to content editors.

First of all, we needed to provide an enhanced way for content managers to navigate through the interface. A custom layout builder was implemented to provide a better and more structured content management experience. The various templates can be built using any combination of some 20+ custom modules based on Advanced Custom Fields that are both purpose-specific and allow enough room for further configuration.

While reimplementing the website, it was important for TestingTime to keep the same user experience their clients have gotten used to and received good feedback for. Their experience in usability was highlighted in the original interface design, therefore we simply reimplemented a one-to-one replica in WordPress. Since we were aiming for an excellent mobile experience we also optimized the responsive design on all devices and screen sizes.

Serving a global market of test users and clients from all continents meant we needed to provide a multilingual experience. WPML is used to create and manage translations in order to keep up with TestingTime’s ever-expanding reach. New languages can easily be added in the future.

The user’s language preference is automatically detected in JavaScript using browser globals to display the proper language and he/she is redirected to his/her language specific page. This is done only when accessing the German homepage. In order to reduce server load and allow for page caching we are using FreeGeoIP to detect the country and seamlessly display the proper content via JavaScript. Different content is shown for Switzerland, Germany, UK or the rest of the world, with the blog currently only being available in the German version.

TestingTime’s blog is meant to serve as a resource hub for testing and usability topics. Among these resources, interviews with leading experts in the field of UX/UI are frequently published. More often than not, the interviewees want to review the blog posts before they get published. Having a constant back and forth via email is very inefficient so we used Public Post Preview, a plugin that allows editors to mark an article as a draft and make it available to interviewees for review without having to log in.

TestingTime also collects a lot of information about users and analyzes that information in order to offer them tailored content and optimize their user experience. This information is transmitted via URL metadata to a Heroku App that analyzes it. Angular has a very specific set of URL parameters that is different from how WordPress does this. To overcome this challenge and keep the existing implementation we enforced a set of redirects that send all existing links to specific URLs and make sure that all required information gets sent to the Heroku App, including every submitted form and all 404 requests.

Marketing and sales are very important for TestingTime and are key in helping them grow and tap into new markets. With the help of SEO they can optimize the content they deliver and expand their reach. We configured the tracking code on key pages in order to follow specific metrics they are interested in and help them optimize and serve more relevant content for specific target groups. We used Google Tag Manager to manage JavaScript and HTML tags and analyze the tracking code.

We also used and extended third-party plugins to help TestingTime better manage their resources. Unbounce helps TestingTime’s marketing department create and manage landing pages to promote their offers and services while ActiveCampaign, an email marketing platform, helps them create subscription forms for enrolling new test users in their system.

We are proud to be the favorite web development partner for promising tech startups like TestingTime. At the same time, we are extremely excited to help grow and promote WordPress as a solution for online businesses. If you think this approach can also help you, don’t hesitate to give us a call.