Customer stories
American Dairy Association North East
Unifying legacy websites into one dynamic solution
Challenge
America loves dairy. From milk to cheese to yogurt, people everywhere are topping their pizzas and foaming their lattes with the wholesome, authentic goodness of dairy products – much of which is produced on local, family-owned farms. And while the average American consumes around 18 gallons of milk a year, the dairy category has been in a state of transition, facing increased competition from new products like soy and almond milk.
The American Dairy Association Northeast (ADANE) aimed to reintroduce Americans to this iconic food group – and tell a more compelling, “homegrown” story about the local farms producing these amazing products. Merging the combined resources of three major dairy associations (representing more than 12,000 dairy farm families across six states) the new ADANE needed a fresh online presence to reflect the scope and the mission of their fledgling brand. They also needed to migrate three legacy websites into one, ensuring that thousands of pages of content were accurately and predictably transitioned to the new site. ADANE also needed a modern, forward-thinking visual aesthetic that best exemplified the combination of traditional farming values and the future health and wellness of Americans. To engage a savvy, increasingly mobile audience, ADANE also required a fully responsive website design, capable of delivering both dynamic and engaging multimedia content to its viewers on any device – as well as a powerful engine for supercharging their SEO.
Solution
To meet these challenges, ADANE turned to Solodev to deliver a comprehensive approach from design to development and beyond. Working closely with senior leadership, the Solodev team helped discover the underlying and unifying voice for the new ADANE brand and message. This included a beautiful new brand template design and color scheme to optimize the user experience (UX) and craft a visually memorable web experience. Inspired by classic Americana, Solodev helped translate timeless ideals into a modern digital presence that bridged the past with the future.
In order to deliver their new website, ADANE first needed to remediate the inherent vulnerabilities in their open source software while also handling the content migration workload. Solodev used its proven website migration strategies to ensure that every one of ADANE’s 450 recipes, 300 blog posts, and hundreds of web pages transitioned to the new website with ease and predictability. To ensure that content was easy to manage and adjust regardless of location, Solodev constructed more than a dozen custom-built web applications with WYSIWYG interfaces. Solodev wanted to ensure that everyone involved with ADANE’s expansive content library could easily navigate the interface, even if they had a relatively small technological background. Additionally, Solodev developed a unique, dynamic blog known as the “Dairy Diary” so that news within the organization could be shared in one easily accessible solution. Solodev leveraged the power of the AWS Global Infrastructure and its 44 Availability Zones to increase redundancy and fault tolerance by replicating data between geographic regions.
Solodev utilized AWS CloudFront, an extremely powerful CDN that drastically increases website performance with higher speeds and lower latency. By leveraging the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Solodev enabled ADANE to quickly auto-scale capacity up and down as their computing requirements changed. As an additional measure, AWS security capabilities and services increased privacy and access control with network firewalls built into Amazon – providing world-class security across the board to ADANE’s system.
Results
The ADANE website has truly become the premier digital experience in the dairy category. Its beautiful, modern design has transformed the industry, setting a backdrop for compelling stories from these community-based dairy farms. It also contributes to the larger narrative of why dairy farm families remain so vital to our culture. Built in Solodev on the AWS Cloud, the fresh, new website consolidated ADANE’s extensive resources into one visually-appealing destination for consumers to learn more about dairy in their local grocery store. Backed by the infrastructure of AWS’s world-class tools such as EC2 and CloudFront, ADANE found security and reliability in the cloud.