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Good migrations

Rebuilding the website for the largest McCann Worldgroup company outside of New York was a big responsibility, but one that I relished.

A migration in two parts

The initial task here was to build the front-end for the new website, based on modern technologies such as VueJS, but using that JAMstack website to pull data from an ageing Wordpress installation. We utilised the Wordpress API to get data, and then spent quite some time finessing the UI so that animations were smooth and looked great.

Step two of the process was to migrate away from the Wordpress setup to something more modern and fit for the future. I modeled and configured a new Sanity setup, then worked on migrating the data over from the old website as a starting point. To add to the complexity, we were asked to make the CMS handle multiple websites at this point - so the same Sanity instance now powers individual websites for McCann Birmingham, McCann Milton Keynes and McCann Leeds. With a few small refactors on the front-end, this was achieved and the tagged content for each site worked seemlessly on their relevant websites.

Whilst at McCann I was involved in a number of projects, and it is worth highlighting one shown here – The "Reversible poetry" campaign for Refuge. Our writers came up with some incredibly powerful poems for this campaign, which was fully integrated across TV, Radio, Outdoor and Print, and I was proud to come up with a technology solution to convey these poems on the web. With a little experimentation, I managed to make the poems physically reverse when the mobile phone holding them was turned upside-down. This completed the campaign's integration, and the digital implementation I put together won numerous awards, including a One Show Gold Pencil.