tyler

The Rebuild

When we acquired this client in early 2021, they had a DCO build from their previous agency partner that they needed to put back into production immediately and they needed it to be as close to exactly the same as it was before. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Doubleclick Studio and the way these creatives and feeds were built, they weren’t in a state to just immediately start serving again. BSC’s relationship with their previous agency had went sour and they were unwilling to provide support and key pieces of the puzzle, so we had to scramble to get everything back in order.

After a large amount of planning, reworking, and unfortunate licensure issues, we were able to get their DCO campaigns back up and running. 70+ Google Web Designer creatives were condensed into one versatile creative, and hundreds of dynamic feeds were condensed into one feed sheet. The final row count for the feed was well over 500,000 lines, which lined up with the previous agency’s strategy.

Google Web Designer – Situational Superiority

While I had many reservations about Google Web Designer as a product, it does DCO extremely well. My team’s perseverance in learning the quirks of this program was nothing but inspirational, and we got to the point where we could do a ton of creative work in very little time.

Dynamic creatives were used to implement responsive sizing requirements where needed, and we leveraged the code view of this program to implement several interesting features that didn’t come out of the box with GWD, like DV360 dynamic query strings for our landing URLs and logic to change creative layouts based on incoming dynamic elements combined with real-time creative sizing.

While most of us scoffed at using this thing for anything remotely close to web development, it ended up being an extremely valuable tool for implementing HTML5-based advertising solutions, and I would now recommend it to anyone needing tools for this purpose.

Dynamic Clinic Pages

Given the diversity of each clinic in their network, our team set out to create a flexible and easy-to-use dashboard implementation so that the client could focus more on content entry and spend less time worrying about clinic page consistency and formatting. This was especially important since most of the site’s content needed both English and Spanish versions.

As lead developer on this project, my primary concern for the clinic pages was to build streamlined, robust theme templates and dashboard views that met these requirements. Naturally, my team and I turned to Advanced Custom Fields Pro to bridge that gap. The core theme template included functionality to order and omit sections based on client preference for that clinic, and each individual section had its own template partial to keep the code tidy and modular.

Analytics, Design, SEO, & Other Requirements

I coordinated my team with several other teams so that we could provide the best possible final product. Integrations included Google Tag Manager, Yoast, Salesforce, Yext Answers, and many more other third-party tools and integrations

There is much, much more about this project that can be detailed here, such as custom insurance post types, custom blog types, an events manager, Pantheon…the list goes on and on. If you would like to know more, just ask!

Bespoke From the Ground-Up

This brand-new website was the result of due diligence in planning and making a solid foundation for the massive amount of information that needed to be presented. Planning started before I got hired at Pleth, and soon after my hire date I was tasked with making sure that their server environment was safe, secure, and robust enough to handle heavy traffic situations. A 3-tier VPC environment with auto-scaling capabilities was the solution.

The site’s base theme is Bootstrap, which ensured a great responsive experience. Custom templates were made for individual page content elements (Twig). Many new templates, views, content types, and taxonomies have been added by our team since the site launched. We have also incorporated other clinic homepages into the site and these domains are also routed through the load balancer with HTTPS termination.

Getting Everything Straight

When I took over D&D of this website, it was five years old. There were *Thirty Six* WordPress plugins installed on the site. Needless to say, it was running a tad bit sluggish. My first task was to clean this up a bit.

The client needed several landing pages developed, and when they needed them, they needed them very quickly. They also had to package up the fields and send them to their CRM. Using the Gravity Forms plugin (I’m a huge fan) and PHP, I was able to grab the submitted info from the form submission and package it into a JSON object, where it was then posted to their CRM’s API.

Email Image Hosting Through CDN

At this point, through many meetings and conversations where I recommended that they upgrade their setup, the client was starting to see the benefits of moving to a more robust system such as Drupal to meet their ever-scaling needs. They were also interested in having their own dedicated server for various reasons. One of those reasons was having a place to host images that a third-party graphic designer was making for their email campaigns. Since they were on a shared hosting environment, we needed to find an interim solution.

That solution came in the form of a string of AWS services. The graphic designer straight-up required that he have SFTP access to upload his images, and no other method would work for him. So, I delivered. A t3.nano EC2 instance was used as an intermediary between the designer and an S3 bucket, providing the interface desired. A CloudFront distribution was put in front of the S3 bucket to serve the files, and Route53 was used to give each image a more digestible URL.