Sector(s)
Project Team
- SparkFabrik: Information Architecture, UX/UI Design, Visual Design, Drupal Development, technical solution architecture
- Cerved Group: Communication team (product ownership), internal SEO experts, multidisciplinary stakeholder group
Cerved Group helps around 30,000 businesses, public administrations, and financial institutions manage the opportunities and risks of their commercial relationships, drawing on a unique pool of data, valuation models, and analysts. The group is also a leading independent operator in performing and non-performing loan assessment and holds one of Europe's most important rating agencies.
Cerved's previous website no longer guided users to the solution that best fit their needs. The group set up a multidisciplinary team, with SparkFabrik as designer and implementer, to redesign its online communication end to end, starting with the editorial platform itself. The work covered information architecture, user experience, visual design, the technical solution, and the new corporate site.
About the project
Goals
- Improve how Cerved's products and services are defined and promoted online
- Make customized services easy to find for every audience, from small businesses to public administration
- Give the internal communication team a flexible platform to manage a complex, evolving offering
Challenge
The brief sat at two extremes of a spectrum at once: help users navigate an articulated, wide-ranging offer, and let digital communication managers govern that complexity through a flexible editorial platform. The site had to be content-first, serve clearly distinct audiences, and stay easy to run day to day.
Solution
SparkFabrik interviewed stakeholders across Cerved to surface the priorities of the existing communication, then, alongside the client's SEO experts, designed and built the information architecture, user experience, visual design, technical architecture, and the site itself. Highlights:
- Audience-first information architecture: navigation built around users and the path to their most relevant content; each audience's products integrate organically into the site as a guided path that stays as invisible as possible
- Personalized experience per audience: content and tone of voice adapt so users quickly recognize where they belong within the vast range of services
- Mobile-first visual design: a minimalist design, in full compliance with Cerved's brand guidelines, that keeps content central and scales to larger screens
- Enterprise editorial platform: Drupal configured for editorial workflows, flexible SEO, and advanced search
- Ecosystem integration: a modular build that slots into Cerved's services and supports fast, reliable releases
Outcome
- Editors manage all site content independently, with no developer dependency
- Any information is reachable by the end user within a maximum of three clicks
- The modular platform integrates simply into the Cerved ecosystem and supports fast, reliable releases
- Cerved regained full control of its content and its offer, on tools that are simple, powerful, and secure
- The collaboration was renewed and expanded after the project
We are very satisfied with the experience with SparkFabrik, who have been able to guide us in exploiting all the potential of Drupal, designing the most suitable architecture to present the wide Cerved offer with simplicity and immediacy.
Anna Micossi, Head of Communication, Cerved Group
Why Drupal was chosen
Cerved needed an enterprise-class platform that could present a wide, complex offering simply while giving its communication team full control of the content. Drupal was selected as a content management system with the soul of a modular framework. It won on:
- Built-in editorial workflows: enterprise-grade management of content and publishing flows out of the box
- Flexible SEO capabilities: a highly configurable SEO layer, important for a content-first corporate site
- Advanced search: the ability to build and manage advanced, structured search across a large offering
- Performance and security: an architecture that guarantees both while remaining highly customizable
- Modularity and integration: a modular platform that integrates cleanly into Cerved's wider ecosystem of services and products
- Editorial autonomy: tools that are simple to use yet powerful, so editors manage everything without developer involvement
- Open source, room to grow: no per-seat licensing and a large community, leaving space for future expansion
Technical Specifications
Drupal was chosen for its modular, framework-like architecture: enterprise-class editorial workflows, a flexible SEO layer, and advanced search are available and configurable without abandoning content management. That modularity let the platform be tailored to a content-first corporate site and integrated cleanly into Cerved's wider ecosystem of services and products, while keeping performance, security, and full editorial autonomy.
