Katanamrp.com website renewal

The starting point

The website is Katana’s main marketing and sales channel, which is why creating landing pages and updating existing content should be fast and flexible. Katana’s sales and marketing needed better tools for updating the content swiftly and proactively without affecting the visual consistency of the site.

The old Katanamrp.com operated on WordPress and utilized the ACF plugin in a headless architecture. This setup presented challenges for content marketing due to its heavy reliance on coding, resulting in slow and complex implementation processes. On top of technical challenges, Katana was in the process of establishing new brand guidelines and a refined narrative. This was the starting point for the website renewal.

The primary objective of the project was to enhance control and flexibility within the CMS while adhering to the new design guidelines. As the old website had been optimized well and was performing well, maintaining good SEO performance was also one of the project’s key objectives.

Making Katana’s brand shine online

The idea wasn’t to blow up the whole website and build something completely new, but rather to build Katana better tools and make their new brand shine in the digital environment. Therefore, the focus was on re-organizing the content intuitively to support the user journey and visual design. Katana’s team had already crafted initial wireframes and by working closely together, we created the final website layouts. 

From headless to Native Gutenberg

The implementation required a transition from the current headless solution to native Gutenberg. The new website was implemented on WordPress using the Evermade Studio with content blocks, custom post types, and functionalities designed specifically for Katana’s needs. In Gutenberg, everything revolves around blocks, which grants content creators a lot of freedom to construct the pages according to their preferences.

The majority of the website content was migrated from the old site. As the old site had a custom block architecture, we had to first map the various old content blocks into their new counterparts. This process involved redesigning and restructuring the blocks to align them with the new design, while also dropping support for unneeded blocks and figuring out how to handle the content data for all these different use cases.

As we did not have access to the old site’s code or data architecture but only raw MySQL data, we had to go through the old block data one by one, block by block, and feature by feature.

After this mapping process, a custom migration plugin was developed to build new Gutenberg blocks from the old site’s content data in tight cooperation with the client for acceptance testing. 

This migration task also meant that content was overwritten programmatically, while the client was simultaneously working on the site content. It was essential to establish clear boundaries on what content could be modified, when, by who, and on the other hand, what still needed migration development work.

In the end, we migrated content into 45 Gutenberg blocks from 400+ posts and pages. 

Close collaboration ensured a successful project

During the project, our teams worked closely together to ensure smooth communication and quick iterations. Direct conversations between experts were crucial as things progressed rapidly. We held weekly meetings to review the project status and prioritize tasks, but communication between Katana’s team and Evermade occurred daily.

The new website’s conversion rate increased 46 % within 3 months after the launch. Good search engine visibility was successfully maintained on the new site. According to Katana’s team, building new landing pages is significantly faster than before – taking only a couple of days instead of the weeks it previously required.