The Challenge

The organizers of the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games & Fuse Marketing Group presented the unroole™ team with a unique challenge:

First, we need a family of websites that will share content and design elements, allowing us to present a unified identity across multiple channels [website and devices], in multiple languages.

Second, each web experience must serve a variety of visitors, each presenting unique use cases. For our team, we need our administrators, who have very limited development skills, to be able to create pages & experiences, and publish them quickly as the need arises.

Third, the experience, and therefore content, of the site will need to evolve over time, be editable by over two hundred and fifty contributors and administrators simultaneously, and, of course, be easy for nontechnical contributors to use.

Finally, the website is a critical component of the overall games experience, and as such we will be promoting it heavily. It is absolutely critical that the website stays up and available for all visitors. The site will need to be able to withstand massive and sustained traffic loads within a very short time period of time. We expect close to five million people may visit the website within the two weeks of Games time alone, and most will visit the site around popular event times.

Why unroole is the right choice for Pan Am 2015

The unroole™ platform addressed each challenge presented in the Pan Am team’s requirements by utilizing unique built-in features ready-made for scalable families, networks, of custom websites.

To tackle the challenge of managing the brand identity across multiple websites, the team leveraged unroole™’s reusable building blocks, which allowed designers and developers to rapidly create reusable blocks of code that were used to easily assemble pages and maintain cross-channel elements. A nice feature of reusable building blocks in unroole™ is that it allows networks of related websites to maintain a unified and consistent experience and brand identity across all channels. The reusable code blocks also sped the development of each subsequent custom website experience significantly. This is part of how unroole™ is able to reduce turn time in web development workflows by up to 60% (see case study), and decrease the time and resources needed to manage and update brand elements across multiple websites.

The Pan Am Games team was able to create pages and experiences utilizing the reusable content blocks and publish them without help from developers by utilizing the unroole™ Cloud IDE. The Cloud IDE together with our CMS allows admins to drag and drop and build pages with ease, and without development resources. Using the Cloud IDE and CMS allows nontechnical users to skip the typical web development workflow. This allows for a quick turnaround time that precludes the need for multiple development environments. You no longer need local, staging, and live environments.

In unroole™, pages can be scheduled to go live at any time in the future. This scheduling feature allowed the Pan Am team to build pages and experiences and have them go live at predetermined, timed, points in the future. The Pan Am family of websites seemingly evolved over time, to the end-user. This feature did not require development resources to build, remember, and publish pages at specific times, rather, it allowed the team to create the experiences in advance and let them auto-publish, freeing up time and resources for other important tasks.

Accommodating a significant team to update the websites was no problem for the Pan Am team. Multi-tenancy and ease of use by non-technical content publishers and marketers was built into unroole™ from the start. Once reusable content blocks and pages were built, it required little training of the 200 plus, non-technical, volunteer contributors on the Pan Am team to begin publishing updates to the Game-time websites in real time. Updates were made across devices, by multiple team members, both during and after events.

Scalability was a critical piece of the unique challenge Pan Am’s team presented to us, and unroole™ met the challenge with it’s fully scalable cloud-based infrastructure utilization. Within a two week window during Game-time, the multiple sites, which made up the Pan Am Games family of sites, were able to serve up more than 138 million page views to over 8 million unique visitors with only 4 developers, and with ZERO downtime. unroole™ was built to live in the cloud, and provides on-demand scalability that you would expect, without the need for Dev Ops.