News: Announcement

On stage at DrupalCon Baltimore with Blue Cross Blue Shield

A joint session with the client on BCBS.com — how a corporate site with content owners spread across the organization was built content-first, on a component system rather than on templates.

April 27, 2017

Sessions co-presented with the client are rare, because they require the client to be willing to describe their own constraints in public. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and Oomph (now Pare & Co) took the UX and Content Strategy track at DrupalCon Baltimore to do exactly that.

The subject was BCBS.com, and the problem was one every large organization recognizes: content owners spread across the business, each with a real stake in a page, and a site that has to stay coherent anyway. Discovery pointed away from designing templates and layouts and toward designing content first — a flexible component system, built on the Paragraphs module, where web admins control the format, placement and use of components page by page.

That is a harder thing to hand over than a set of templates, and a more durable one. Templates decide what a page can be years before anyone knows what it needs to say.

Via DrupalCon Baltimore.