Rebuilding a global site in 12 weeks

Over the years, Dentsu's international presence has significantly grown and, with it, so too has the need for a new website. With a global, educated and tech-savvy audience to impress, they needed an agency who could deliver a sleek, high performing website that embodies their Japanese heritage. Our extensive international experience and consultative approach made us the ideal agency partner.

Following a rebrand, the existing Dentsu X site no longer effectively reflected their business or international ambitions. While the new website needed to highlight their global position in the market, it was also imperative to capture their Japanese heritage. Upon beginning the project, Dentsu X had planned to keep the website rebuild in-house, with a slick new design created by their graphic design team.

Leaning on our expertise for support, our consultative approach, detailed recommendations and guidance ultimately led to Dentsu X’s decision to outsource the project. Relieving substantial pressure from their team, IDHL was brought on board to consult and develop their new website to meet an extremely tight timescale of just 12 weeks.

Taking the stylish designs created by their in-house graphic design team, we translated their vision into a format that considered the intricacies of web design. Umbraco was proposed as the platform of choice, offering a solution that could meet Dentsu X’s global requirements yet offers the added benefit of no license cost. Approaching the project in phases allowed us to achieve the tight turnaround, with parts of the site initially made static with a plan to make the full site editable after launch.

A global site which will run approximately 50 different cultures, this build leveraged our experience in complex international projects. The website needed to be scalable with the ability to hand different cultures over to a market to run themselves. This was an important part of the solution, empowering Dentsu X to easily create and share content with the specific, relevant markets.

For enhanced manageability, a centralised site solution was deployed with appropriate permissions granted for the necessary teams, allowing them to handle both global and local requirements from one location. Gaining editor efficiencies was a key objective, aiming to eliminate effort duplication when managing their site across numerous territories.

With such extensive cultures to satisfy, the languages Dentsu X’s site needed to support are vast and include a range of bespoke language variants. As content text length can vary dramatically when translated, the website design needed to be flexible and able to adapt to volume of text inputted. To cope with this, we built greater editing capabilities into the site that gives users the amend text colour dependent upon positioning and what elements it overlays.

Successfully built and launched to meet the 12-week timeframe, Dentsu X now have a website that reflects their size, international scale and they are perfectly positioned to satisfy their educated users.