A network of local offices in Belgium

PIA Group asked us to design and develop their new website to help scale their business. Our mission was to create a future-proof website to consolidate the new PIA branding and aggregate the services of all local offices in the network.

One CMS to rule them all

One of the first challenges we wanted to tackle was to find a fitting content management system to manage all the data of an ever expanding network of local offices. A fast and user-friendly interface that is easy to manage by all of Pia's editors. This is where DatoCMS came into play.

Headless CMS vs Traditional CMS

Customers are becoming increasingly diverse and interact with brands in different ways. Traditional CMS's like WordPress or Drupal are no longer the right solution for transforming the operations of our clients. This is where DatoCMS comes into play, a modern headless CMS that is capable of integrating every framework and technology, making it easy to deliver content on multiple platforms.

Component-based architecture

Our second challenge was to come up with a design system that could accommodate all content incorporated in a unified branding. We implemented a component-based architecture, a framework for building digital products based on reusable atoms, components & sections. We firmly believe in this approach from both a development and client perspective. It allows us to efficiently scale our designs and easily iterate in development.

Our finalised design consists of 24 custom designed content blocks that can be used throughout the website. We integrated these content blocks in the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor of DatoCMS. The ambition was to give PIA Group the flexibility to build pages in a dynamic way instead of relying on a predefined set of designed pages.

Key takeaways from this project

By putting our expertise to full use and intensively co-creating with PIA Group, we managed to create a performant, inclusive and user-friendly end result. Some highlights and key takeaways we got from this project:

• using DatoCMS as a headless CMS to centralize the content input and management of all Pia local offices

• using a component based architecture to easily scale our designs and quickly iterate in development

• getting a 100 out of 100 Google Lighthouse audit score

• a max server response times of <200ms

• combining the data of 37 offices and 308 municipalities in one uniformized SEO strategy