Team Danmark
From Sitecore to Umbraco as a headless CMS
A straight-forward solution with impressive results 🙌
Main goal - less complexity, more simplicity
Team Danmark is an organization funded by the Danish government through the proceeds from Danske Spil, the state-controlled organization for betting on sports, with the purpose of supporting and promoting elite sports in Denmark.
Coming from a large and complex Sitecore solution there was an internal need and desire to minimize complexity, reduce the target audience and improve the content management process on the site. The idea was, that less content and more relevant information can make it easier to maintain a successful Team Danmark website.
A 100 pages - one menu
The new Team Danmark site has only one level of menu even though it consists of a 100 pages. The concept is, that either on desktop, tablet or mobile nobody wants to go through a complicated hierarchy. Instead, you should be able simply read the content sections, and that will take you anywhere relevant. If you got lost there is always the powerful Elasticsearch at the top and bottom of the page that can guide you on the way – supplemented with a footer navigation.
So talking offset in the user journey, and not the classical content silos – the site unfolds content by drilldown from within other content in the form of text, images and videos but also data from all Team Danmark’s internal system. All is based on Umbraco’s grid layout with a simple site architecture and design that was planned and discussed during a series of workshops between Team Danmark, Magic People Voodoo People and us, Compent.
Going headless
Team Danmark’s internal architecture is built on Microsoft technologies in different versions of .NET.
Everything is exposed via API and all the data, both informative (such as all sports results the last 8 years) and visual effects (like number of athletes, medals won etc) is extracted from this API daily and is always up to date.
The new design wasn’t created to just make the website look pretty, it also had to embed the Lean values of Team Danmark.
The client also wanted the new solution to be very fast and modern but also secure.
The site is built on headless Umbraco 7 on two different server instances (frontend and Umbraco backend) with Redis and Rabbit MQ.
The frontend is build on .NET Core with Angular 2 and bootstrap as main technologies.
“Our new Umbraco site is faster and far more intuitive to work with. In addition, it provides us with a flexibility that we have lacked before which is necessary for our digital presence as an innovative and lean organization. The new Umbraco site not only makes the work for our editors easier but also improves our visitors' experience on the site.”
All Team Danmark’s public available data was established before the project even started via API and Elasticsearch, so taking advantage of the existing architecture Elasticsearch was implemented as the main search engine of the site.
Not only for auto-suggest and free-text search, but also for sorting large amounts of data lists when you look at sections with results.
