A fresh face: from design to live in 48 hours

The Customer: Raydiant

Raydiant provide solutions for brick-and-mortar restaurants, stores, brands, and venues to turn their customer and employee data into in-location experiences. Their offerings range from digital signage and kiosks to employee platforms and in-store visitor analytics. They’re tackling the aspects of in-location customer and employee experiences that have previously been difficult to measure, expensive to create, or efficient to manage. And the companies benefiting from those solutions span from neighbourhood boutiques to global franchises. 

The Raydiant website is a crucial part of their marketing and sales strategy while simultaneously acting as an access point to their own web app.

The Challenge: Creating an easily editable site on Contentful, fast, with the ability to handle increasing volumes of traffic

At the time of creation, Raydiant were in the midst of capital raise. They had migrated from Wordpress to Contentful about a year prior, and were operating on a custom-built front end that severely restricted changes and updates to the site. 

With a lean marketing team, the VP of Marketing, Ryan Helmstetler, needed to update the Raydiant site to reflect the aspects of the company that the CEO was pitching to potential investors. The current site was inflexible and didn’t allow the necessary changes without going through the time consuming process of design and subcontracted development which would have taken weeks at best, and been incredibly costly.

Additionally, the existing website was starting to struggle with the quantity of traffic it was receiving amidst the media attention caused during the capital raise. The site was using static site generation, however some features, such as the blog search and app marketplace were making real-time calls to the Contentful content API and they began to hit their Contentful plan API call limit, costing them expensive overage fees. 

Raydiant needed a site they could easily make in-house changes to, fast, that could easily handle the capacity of traffic they were receiving. They also required immediate support to get their website content updated for their capital raise.

Why Raydiant chose Octana

Marketing-friendly tools

• Octana provides Raydiant with a level of flexibility they were not able to achieve with their original custom front end built on Contentful. They can now make structural changes and content changes quickly and easily without needing to outsource to developers. 

• The existing Raydiant branding and visual design was able to easily be applied to the Octana UI Kit giving them a ready-to-use library of fully branded components without embarking on a major re-branding project alongside their website migration.

• The Raydiant site holds a huge amount of content — some of which was not being indexed by Google prior to the move. The Octana MapMaster tool allows Raydiant to bulk edit and publish content for rapid SEO improvements.

Professional services

• Octana stepped in to help create the new Raydiant home page. They went from design to live within 48 hours.

• The team helped transport content across to the new site, meaning Raydiant’s lean team didn’t have to worry about the time consuming job of re-entering content.

Partnership with Netlify

• Raydiant chose to bundle Octana with Netlify for their hosting needs. This consolidated everything into a single contract with Octana reducing the fragmented nature of the support they were getting from different companies. Raydiant now has a single point of contact if there is ever an issue.

• The move to Netlify enabled them to better handle spikes in web traffic without reducing the performance and speed of their site or incurring unexpected additional costs.

Better integrations

• Octana’s Integration layer allows for a more consistent, stable integration between their Contentful site and Raydiant’s CRM HubSpot. Prior to this the integration was fragile. The team was required to regularly copy and paste code for their forms, making edits to ensure it worked. The Integration layer makes this a more simple, stable experience, and has also improved the connection to their Martech ecosystem.

“We needed a new site that we could actually edit. And we needed it fast. Octana stepped up to not only provide us the new version of the site in record time, but also gave us the tools to make ongoing edits ourselves without outsourcing to an external development team.” 

Successful outcomes

• The Raydiant team now have sufficient control over their website, empowering them to make the changes they need as soon as they need them without reliance on developer support.

• The Octana team took Raydiant’s established branding and applied it to the Octana UI kit giving them a ready-to-use library of fully branded components. They can now build an add to pages without touching a line of code, and it’s all on brand. 

• The previous version of the website contained content that was not able to be indexed by Google. Migrating to Octana corrected these errors, allowing all of their content to be indexed correctly and increasing their organic traffic.