Shure.com

A world-renowned manufacturer of iconic and legendary audio products, Shure, Inc. looked to Viget to replace their unwieldy and bloated proprietary web platform powering the Shure Americas web site. We developed a nimble, cost-effective, and extensible technology platform that aligns with the quality standards the Shure brand has maintained over nearly a century. Since launching, we’ve continued to help Shure achieve business goals that previously were impossible to reach with a one-size-fits-all content management product.

Shure’s business is complex, serving markets through channel partners and distributors across the globe. We quickly discovered the site housed a massive volume of diverse, rich, and deeply-related data -- and supported a wide range of uses. Since we were replacing an existing application and technology set up, one of our first steps was to re-think the content organization. Then, we focused on the task of developing a custom CMS using Ruby on Rails. The flexible architecture of Rails mitigates the risk that the CMS cannot meet unforeseen future goals, thus ensuring the long-term sustainability of the platform.

Shure wasn’t looking for just a new platform. We helped the organization shift from a web team that updates HTML files to one that manages an application using development best practices. We’ve introduced a process with feature development in parallel with content management, version control, peer reviews, continuous integration, workflow management, and staging sites for stakeholder approval. The new CMS also provides more efficient and expanded content management controls for contributors, making it faster and safer to publish changes within the supported functionality. Once in place, we trained their content team on how to manage content and worked to integrate their developers into our production process to accelerate their mastery of the new technology.

The existing application and site was running slow with too many CSS and JavaScript files being loaded on each page. As we rebuilt the front-end, we overhauled the CSS and JavaScript for the new platform, making the files smaller, smarter, and more targeted to individual features. This resulted in better performance and easier long-term maintenance. CSS was refactored into Sass using OOCSS principles, allowing for cleaner, more modular stylesheets. 

The incumbent web platform did not support mobile users. As we built out the front-end of the new CMS, we created mobile pages for the site and optimized the desktop pages for tablet display. This was a big win for Shure: mobile device visits now account for 20% of monthly traffic to the Shure Americas web site.

The CMS had to power both an English site and a Spanish site, with content curated specifically for each site not just a one-to-one translation between languages. To ensure efficiency and coverage, we created a system adapted for each content type with fallbacks and manual overrides based on administration workflow. The result is a customized platform tailored to the business, marketing, and customer needs, as well as the operations of the content management team.

It’s rare to get a chance to both improve a client’s business and save them money. After completing the development of the CMS, we helped Shure evaluate and migrate the platform from a poorly performing and costly provider to a hybrid cloud and dedicated hardware hosting setup. Not only did this reduce monthly hosting costs by 65%, it also provides high performance and redundancy.

Our first opportunity to expand the platform came shortly after completing the hosting move. With the flexibility offered by the new Ruby on Rails CMS, we were able to develop a high-design landing page builder that Shure could use to merchandise the product catalog for vertical markets, make hubs for trade shows, and introduce new product lines. We began by prototyping autonomous Rails engines that interacted with the main application, then generated high-fidelity wireframes and visual design to establish a style guide for future landing pages. We built out the first landing page and added custom style sheets management, giving the Shure web team a starting place and the tools to adjust the design in future instances.

For years the Shure product catalog has been kept up-to-date through a time-intensive manual process. Similar to the landing page builder, the new Ruby on Rails platform offered us an opportunity to leverage data to create a new application for product registration. Customers are presented with an interface that makes it fast and easy to find their product. Accounts are instantly created when the customer completes the process, sending the customer information into Shure’s CRM system.