Upgrading vs. Upcycling - How to stay ahead of the curve

A full rebuild of a website can be a time and money consuming process. This session is about exploring different approaches between upgrading and upcycling existing websites.

To keep up with online trends, technical debt, or just to be able to refresh their appearance, websites often get rebuilt between every 3 to 6 years. We have helped helped many clients transition from their legacy web systems onto Drupal 8 but not everyone is ready to do the move all at once.

If you find yourself in the situation of having a well established web system that has seen a few years already, but you aren’t ready to spend the time and money to do a full rebuild, upcycling might be the answer.

Upcycling allows website owners bring improvements to their websites continuously without the need to wait for a full rebuild. It reduces time to market and risk and are able to leverage up-to-date technology by upcycling individual parts of the website.

Upcycling can enable you to:

Get the most out of your existing website infrastructure

Benefit from user experience, design or frontend performance improvements without the need to wait for a big relaunch

Improve the editorial experience

Implement your investments as quickly as possible

Use Drupal 8 features

This incremental approach allows us refresh parts of the existing website and make it ready for a later transition or into an existing website infrastructure or build decoupled parts of it in Drupal 8.

This session is intended especially for those in architect & client-facing roles but basically for anyone who would like to:

Weigh the pros and cons of Upgrading vs. Upcycling

Leverage decoupled technology early on

Improve an existing Drupal 7 site

Migrate to Drupal 8

Improve an existing Drupal 8 site

https://events.drupal.org/seattle2019/sessions/upgrading-vs-upcycling-how-stay-ahead-curve

Transcript

1. Upcycling vs. Upgrading How to stay ahead the curve Josef Dabernig, Senior Consultant
2. SENIOR CONSULTANT josef.dabernig@unic.com twitter.com/dasjo Josef Dabernig
3. Agenda 1. Why to Upcycle or Upgrade? 2. Areas for Upcycling 3. Examples 4. Q & A
4. 1. Why to Upcycle or Upgrade?
5. Our software is outdated but migrating everything would take years of effort
6. The market is demanding rapid innovation but we don’t have money to redo everything
7. I want a better experience but I don’t want disruptive change every couple of years
8. Upcycling proposition § Reduce time to market for new features § Leverage new technology without a rebuild § Improve Design, UX, Contents iteratively § Enhance Performance, SEO and Analytics Major release New release 6-month releases Q2 Q1 Q3 Q4 1.02.0 3.0 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Now: Steady releases Before: Unpredictable releases https://dri.es/state-of-drupal-presentation-september-2018
9. Upcycling proposition § Reduce time to market for new features § Leverage new technology without a rebuild § Improve Design, UX, Contents iteratively § Enhance Performance, SEO and Analytics
10. Build Discovery Maintenance
11. Build Discovery Maintenance Upcycling
12. 2. Areas for Upcycling
13. Areas for Upcycling Design UX Content Features Technology Performance SEO Analytics
14. Do the right things… Design UX Content Features
15. Design potentials
16. Design potentials o Does the look and feel of your website feel outdated? o Are there inconsistencies within the design?
17. Design potentials → It might be time to do a design refresh, establish a design system or rebuild the frontend
20. 2 redesigns in 3 years Theme-switch based refactoring Filter pages using React
21. UX Potentials
22. UX potentials o Are there problems with your site navigation? o Do your main target groups struggle with finding key information? o Does the interaction feel static / not up to date?
23. UX potentials → Think about reworking the Information Architecture and optimize the User Experience
26. Removed the sidebar navigation Tweaked navigation points without a full redesign
27. Content potentials
28. Content potentials o Do you struggle with content editing? o Do your translation & content editing workflows feel outdated? o Is your information architecture outdated?
29. Content potentials → Updates to your content architecture & editing workflows → Get users the information they need
32. New Drupal 8 country pages Hosting-based switch: D7 & D8 Paragraphs instead of WYSIWYG
33. Feature potentials
34. Feature potentials o Do your end users expect new features that weren’t available when the site was built? o Are your site features still the most relevant? o Would you like to add new functionality to the website?
35. Feature potentials → Addition of new features and removal of unwanted features keeps your site relevant
38. Added faceted search to navigate job listings per category and see their jobs number
39. Areas for Upcycling Design UX Content Features Technology Performance SEO Analytics
40. Do the things right… Technology Performance SEO Analytics
41. Technology potentials
42. Technical potentials o Do bugs & regressions affect you too often or are maintenance costs too high? o Are new features held back by the architecture or possible side-effects? o Would you like to see changes to your hosting and deployment workflows?
43. Design potentials → Platform updates and gradual refactorings will save a lot of headaches
46. 2016 Drupal 6, relaunched in 2015 Full rebuild because of limited complexity and end of life
47. Performance potentials
48. Performance potentials o Does the site feel slow on certain devices? o Are you not aware of key performance metrics of your site?
49. Performance potentials → Tracking, Analyzing & Performance Optimization make sure your site reaches its goals
50. Expernal performance audit. Theme registry, cron, lazy-loading, caching, hosting improvements
51. SEO potentials
52. SEO potentials § Do you think your site could rank better amongst search results? § Do end users struggle to find the contents they are looking for?
53. SEO potentials → Make sure your website ranks high using SEO audits and optimizations
54. Regular SEO checks make sure the site ranks well, especially when new country pages get launched
55. Analytics potentials
56. Analytics potentials o Do you want to have better insights on how your site is doing? o Would you like to be able to track the success of different parts of the website?
57. Analytics potentials → Analytics & reports will give you the insights needed for your website
58. Send user-specific events to intercom such as login, signup, content likes, answers, ...
59. for.org § Track user-specific events and publish them to intercom § User login, signup, content likes, user answers questions, ...
60. 3. Upcycling decisions
61. Upcycling & Decoupling § Allow different parts of the system to move at different speeds
62. When to upgrade and when to upcycle? § Wait for the big bang relaunch or prioritize incremental changes and time to market? § Are there a lot of interdependencies or can you create vertical slices? § Are you end of live or can you further support the base platform(s)? § Do you want to maintain a single system or do you prefer multiple smaller systems?
63. Feedback, slides: tinyurl.com/UpcyclingSeattle
64. Thank you.
65. SENIOR CONSULTANT josef.dabernig@unic.com twitter.com/dasjo Josef Dabernig