Seamless CMS consolidation for leading fitness group
The challenge
Urban Gym Group is a leading fitness group that places its community front and centre. The group owns and operates 6 unique fitness and wellness brands across 35 gyms in major cities throughout the Netherlands, including Trainmore, Renessence, Clubsportive, Bootyclub, and Trib3. The group’s mission is to foster a diverse community catered to fitness and well-being through innovative gym concepts.
The group required a complete redesign of their website with a bespoke solution architecture to consolidate the content management systems of their 5 separate brand websites into a single platform.
The challenge was to aggregate and centralise all content management into a single platform that could deliver a fast website with rapid content updates.
Additionally, the group required the websites to have a multilingual URL structure and the capability to build complex page structures inside the CMS. This meant that the group needed an internal infrastructure to support this solution with multiple environments.
The difficulty was that there was no infrastructure to work from, including no defined development process or ways of working. We needed to present simple yet effective solutions to meet these demands.
Our solution
In collaboration with leading Amsterdam based design firm RONIN, our team worked on delivering a seamless, centralised platform for all UGG brands and the UGG corporate website, with performance and content updates at the centre.
With a cleverly designed headless CMS using Contentful, we used ‘contentful spaces’ for logical separation of each UGG website. In combination, we leveraged the robust framework of NextJS to support the seamless build and functionality of the platform to create 4 distinct websites that read from one centralised headless CMS using GraphQL API.
Our team used Microsoft Azure as the cloud provider, GitHub for source control and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), Kubernetes for application management, and Terraform for Infrastructure management. Additionally, our team integrated JotForm for form submissions.
Our team also developed custom Contentful applications that allow the client’s content managers to build complex page structures and manage/create content with ease.
To create the multilingual URL structure, our team used the dynamic NextJS routing system and applied customised algorithms to calculate the localisation. This supports the regeneration of static content and presents it in a seamless, beautiful way.
We managed to significantly increase the performance of the static websites using ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) which updates static content in runtime to streamline the revalidation process.
Critically, we helped develop a robust way of working to assist the UGG team with their content management processes, including the development process and automated deployments, etc. As the group previously had no infrastructure to enable this, our team implemented all infrastructure to support applications. For example, we implemented AKS, ACR, and Storage Accounts to assist with blob, table, file sharing, etc.
The result
Thanks to our consolidation efforts and bespoke solutions architecture, Urban Gym Group now has a fast and seamless centralised platform to manage all of its website content.
This has led to a significant reduction in the system’s cognitive load when managing different applications. This means the UGG’s content managers only need to focus on content without having to manage the front end/user interface.
Since all applications are dockerised, there has been increased consistency of application behaviour between environments. Our usage of Kubernetes further improved consistency.
Importantly, UGG has a new development process set up that is supported by multiple environments (DEV, QA, PROD). This will assist the team in developing new features, actioning debugging approaches, and automating deployments.
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