Case Study: Eko Atlantic website redesign

Client Profile

The new city of Eko Atlantic is the most impressive urban land reclamation development project in Africa.

Eko Atlantic will be a new home to 250,000 people and the workplace of another 150,000. The ten square kilometre development will have waterfront areas, tree-lined streets, efficient transport systems and mixed-use plots that combine residential areas with leisure facilities, offices and shops.

Eko Atlantic will enhance the status of the capital city of Lagos and create a new and stronger financial hub for the whole of West Africa.

Building a new city that will become the financial centre of Nigeria, if not West Africa, is a major undertaking. The scale of the Eko Atlantic project is immense and progress is being achieved through a team effort between investors, planners, engineers and contractors.

We’re proud to have been selected and challenged to redesign and redevelop Eko Atlantic’s website so that it mirrors the scale and true spirit of innovation of this new city.

Project Summary

South Energyx Nigeria Limited, a subsidiary of the Chagoury Group, was created to oversee the planning and development of Eko Atlantic; its managers and consultants bring a wealth of experience to the creation of Eko Atlantic.

South Energyx, challenged Maxiom Technology in late November 2012 to redesign and redevelop and launch a truly impressive website in 2 months.

Eko Atlantic’s existing website was static and (very) outdated. Simple and mundane activities such updating content required a technical resource to do it. The site search engine popularity was inexistent as was any Social media integration. It was amateurly designed and developed and its esthetics left a lot to be desired. South Energyx needed help, and they had come to the right place.

Solution

The first step in the process of proposing a sound technology solution is to build or build on top of a base framework that would support the organization for an extended period of time. In this case, Maxiom Technology chose WordPress as the foundation of the website.
WordPress is an easy to use, yet very powerful and extensible content management system. Cloud hosting and performance execution contributed to a highly available, performant website.

The following is a short-list of technology solutions that applies to this project:

• Deployed WordPress CMS for Content Management and Blogging functionality
• Complete website creative redesign and WordPress theme creation
• Responsive design for support of mobile devices of various screen size
• Content migration and development
• Comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and implementation
• Image Gallery Component
• Video Gallery Component, supporting YouTube, Vimeo as well as self-hosted videos
• Interactive project development progress Timeline component
• Hosted on the cloud in the Microsoft Azure Cloud Infrastructure
• Implemented Content Delivery Network (CDN) for all assets, such as videos, images etc
• Implemented Object Caching yielding a 10x improvement in website performance
  • Instant subsequent page views: browser caching
  • Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly
  • Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more page
  • Improved web server performance; sustain high traffic periods
  • Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds
• Automated nightly back-up and disaster recovery practices
• Implemented permanent 301 redirects for all the old site’s links to correspond with the new information architecture and navigation
• Ongoing support and maintenance engagement

Results

The results really speak for themselves. The new website now complements the majestic construction project. With the implementation of the WordPress CMS as its foundation, South Energyx’s web team has the content flexibility to easily swap out content and control the overall messaging of the site. The website now supports a robust taxonomy that enables cross-linking and content promotion at lower level pages.

The customized SEO measures we’ve implemented will secure an improved site ranking across multiple search engines. Search ranking will also benefit from the increased level of social media channels integration.

Finally, with the deployment to the Windows Azure Cloud Infrastructure and the implementation of additional scalability measures Ekoatlantic.com is guaranteed to perform under a traffic load that it could not handle previously.

The new site launched on February 20th, on time and on budget. On the very next day, the SEO efforts are already yielding awesome results.

All of us at Maxiom Technology are looking forward to witnessing Eko Atlantic’s success, and to be at their (technology) side along the way.