Overcoming a daunting content management challenge
ODL was already operating within Content Hub for multiple websites, but their marketing team was frustrated with the inefficiencies of maintaining product pages on odl.com and working in separate HubSpot portals for their secondary sites. When ODL needed to update their sites, they had to make changes across multiple portals and edit 80+ product pages individually, resulting in extra manual work and opportunities for error.
They approached Salted Stone with a desire to develop a scalable website that enabled them to efficiently present their depth and breadth of products, avoided the need for ongoing development support, utilized Content Hub features they had previously left untapped, and refreshed their visual presence.
Developing a scalable HubDB-powered solution
The first step of the process was to consolidate six websites and two HubSpot CRMs across ODL’s brands into a single site in a single HubSpot portal. This created a consistent and unified experience for employees maintaining content and data, and customers and partners interacting with the ODL website. This phase included a HubSpot-to-HubSpot CRM migration, strategic guidance on site consolidation, and the design and development of a mobile-optimized website theme and module/section library leveraging Content Hub’s drag-and-drop functionality.
The next phase tackled the challenge of maintaining product pages efficiently. ODL wanted to greatly expand the number of navigable doorglass product pages and add an entirely new library of door products, all while significantly streamlining the time required to update or add products. After brainstorming several possible options and their benefits, the Salted Stone development team recommended the use of nested HubDB tables to create dynamic product pages.
Salted Stone’s developers used HubDB to create two layers of tables that would be tied together with anchor properties. First, the team set up one “dynamic pages” HubDB table for each product type: doorglass, doors, and door accessories. These tables contain basic information such as the model number, metadata, and page slug. Each row of the table corresponds to a single product page on the live site.
Next, the team set up one “model number configurations” HubDB table for each product type, which includes significantly more data about individual configurations of products – such as colors, textures, privacy and weather ratings – plus the model number which is used to associate multiple rows of data from this table back to the single row in the “dynamic pages” table, and its corresponding product page.
Additionally, tables were created and associated with location and language data for ODL to manage products visible to customers across the US, Canada, and Canadian French websites.
Emma Milnamow, the Salted Stone Account Manager for ODL, reflected on this stage: “The system was complex to build, but simple to maintain by a non-developer, which was exactly what the client was looking for. The HubDB setup gives ODL the ability to edit things granularly by going into single rows and making individual changes, but also supports bulk edits with a simple .csv upload.”
The Salted Stone team also created HubDB tables for texture and color references, making it easy to control certain global details without updating product data directly. Karen Cagape, who leads Salted Stone’s development team, explains. “On the back end, we created these reference tables (including names, French translations, and images) used across all product tables to make bulk updates easy. So if there’s an update to a product color, ODL only has to update it once on the reference table and it will apply to all products.”
After the data structure was created in HubDB, Salted Stone and ODL collaborated to map the columns from the tables to the newly designed, mobile-optimized front-end pages and filterable indexes, which partners and customers now use to view ODL’s products.
The penultimate phase of the project involved documentation of all HubDB tables created and a combination of 4 hours of live and recorded training for the ODL team on how to manage standard drag-and-drop webpages in addition to product data in HubDB.
Following training and the completion of website production, Salted Stone launched the US site and two Canadian site variants, set redirects to the new pages from multiple other domains, and monitored the new site for several weeks before closing out the project.
Results
ODL customers and partners can now access a much more thorough and filterable product library that showcases the depth and breadth of ODL's offerings. On the US site alone, ODL now features over 1,700 product pages, representing a 1,876% increase in the quantity of viewable products versus their previous site.
On the back end, we measured a 75% decrease in time required to update one attribute on all existing product pages by manipulating a .csv and uploading to HubDB versus the previous method of editing 86 individual webpages, even with the massive uptick in the quantity of product pages. The marketing team is also not reliant on developer resources to make updates to standard content, with 26 saved sections to drag-and-drop on webpages and landing pages while maintaining design consistency across the site.
Corey Philip, Digital Marketing Manager at ODL, said of the partnership with Salted Stone:
“We migrated our website due to consolidating 6 websites and 2 HubSpot portals into one. That meant combining customer files, content, product data and more. They were professional, experts with web development, and communicated well.”
Ongoing maintenance has been easy for the ODL team, despite the increase in the quantity of product pages on the site. Investing in training has enabled them to feel confident in making updates to standard and HubDB-powered pages, both individually and in bulk. This successful migration and development project lays the groundwork for future growth with HubSpot as ODL scales, and empowers employees, partners, and customers alike with a seamless online experience of ODL’s products.
