Land O'Lakes Website

Background

Land O’Lakes, Inc. Is a member-owned Agricultural cooperative based in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs of Arden Hills, Minnesota, focusing on the dairy industry. The co-op states that it has about 3,600 direct producer-members, 1,000 member-cooperatives, and about 10,000 employees who process and distribute products for about 300,000 agricultural producers, handling 12 billion pounds of milk annually. Land O’Lakes is ranked third on the National Cooperative Bank Co-op 100 list of mutuals and cooperatives. The Co-op is one of the largest producers of butter and cheese in the United States.

Project type: Public Website Platform: Kentico

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Goals

High Monkey worked closely with the Land O’ Lakes Inc. team to assists in the migration process of the consumer facing website for the dairy foods division of Land O’ Lakes from their current EMS, into a new Kentico environment. The primary goals of the site development included:

Combining the current desktop and mobile sites into one site with responsive design
Integrating a third-party search platform (Azure search) into Kentico with custom web part development
Tie-in data from a separately developed Recipe Management System (RMS), also developed in Kentico and running as a separate site
Build the site in a way for Land O’ Lakes Inc to be able to manage the site independently

Challenges

During the duration of this project there were several challenges that needed to be addressed, they included:

Helping Land O‘Lakes decide on a Content Management System in which to migrate their original site from that made sense financialy as well as from a management perspective
Redevelopment of the legacy environment HTML and CSS to create the new responsive framework
Defining the Information Architecture, Page Types, Metadata and page structure to further aid search functionality and mimic search from the legacy environment
Pulling data from the Recipe Management System (RMS), a separate Kentico site used to store a large collection of recipes, and presenting that information to the public as grouped collections and individual recipes
Redevelop the Simple Rewards club section of the website that allows users to log in and bookmark recipes for easy access, rate and comment on recipes, comment on blog postings and sign up for a recurring newsletter
Migrating the existing user data for the Simple Rewards^™ club section and extend the Kentico login controls to work with the existing hashed passwords

Services Required

Search and Content Strategy

UX and DX Design

Website Design and Build

Solution

In order to provide the best solution for this project, High Monkey began by having several meetings with the team at Land O’Lakes to assist in selecting a Content Management System that made the most sense to move to from their original environment. There were several steps that needed to take place in order for the migration from the legacy CMS to the Kentico EMS environment to be a smooth and seamless one.

When dealing with the legacy environments CSS High Monkey redeveloped the original code to provide both responsive design as well as making adjustments to help fit the new Kentico environment templates, all while refreshing the design to update the look and feel of the site. Doing this helped to provide Land O’Lakes with templates that not only functioned like the original site but also helped in providing a responsive experience from which would allow users to visit the site from a variety of devices without loosing any site functionality.

When looking at the LandOLakes.com search functionality, it was important to the team at Land O’Lakes that the search looked and functioned as it did in the original environment with improvments to the results. High Monkey helped to make this a reality by developing a custom web part to integrate Azure search, allowing faceted results as well as distinct result item templates. Structured page data was also integrated to assist in better searchability for both internal (Azure) search as well as external, public search engines.

For the recipes section of the website, the Land O’Lakes team still wanted to manage all of this data from an external centralized Recipe Management System (RMS) and surface this data on the website. High Monkey developed the code and structure to allow site editors to easily integrate with the RMS data through custom page types where authors could choose from drop-down menus to build out the public site structure.

This project had an extremely tight deadline of 4 months that began in late 2015 and was completed with a relaunch of the new site at the end of March 2016!