Edwards Lifesciences is the global leader in the science of heart valves and hemodynamic monitoring. Driven by a passion to help patients, the company partners with clinicians to develop innovative technologies in the areas of structural heart disease and critical care monitoring that saves and enhances lives. Headquartered in Irvine, California, Edwards Lifesciences has extensive operations in North America, Europe, Japan, Latin America, and Asia and currently employs 11,000+ individuals worldwide.
The Opportunity
As part of its marketing and communications initiatives, Edwards Lifesciences collaborates with several different creative agencies to create and manage a collection of approximately 15 highly-focused, topic- driven, educational microsites. While each microsite looked great on it’s own, the visual design and technology used were inconsistent across the sites—some microsites used WordPress, some used Drupal, and some used lesser-known or proprietary content management systems.
In looking to the future, Edwards Lifesciences not only wanted a consistent visual representation of the brand across all microsites but a single technology platform that would act as the foundation for all brand sites. With a plan in place to transition existing microsites to the new platform and the decision made to use WordPress, the company reached out to Zeek Interactive.
With extensive experience in WordPress, a deep understanding of enterprise-level business needs, and a rich history of working with digital publishers, Zeek was uniquely qualified to deliver a custom WordPress publishing solution—one that empowers agency partners, streamlines microsite creation, and accelerates the publishing process while maintaining the integrity of the Edwards Lifesciences brand.
The Tool Selection
Edwards Lifesciences engaged Zeek Interactive to engineer a WordPress publishing package that would allow partner marketing and communications agencies to create new visually and technologically consistent brand microsites without requiring code and development resources.
From our experience working with digital publishers and collaborating with creative agencies, the team at Zeek was acutely aware that the new publishing platform needed to put marketing teams in control of the content, allowing for complex page layouts and variable design options, while keeping performance a priority.
The team also understood that the digital solution provided needed to be flexible, scalable, and extensible to accommodate future growth.
With this in mind, Zeek leveraged a component-based design approach and engineered the solution using Beaver Builder.
Beaver Builder is the only WordPress page builder Zeek uses because it is highly extensible, intuitive, flexible, and easy for clients to use.
Most page building solutions available in the WordPress ecosystem generate bloated code that often causes performance issues and plugin conflicts. Beaver Builder is the only page builder built with performance and scale in mind, loading the minimum CSS and JavaScript needed per page.
The Publishing Solution
Our work began with the extensive Edwards Lifesciences brand style guide, which includes guidelines for all website components. Zeek Interactive recreated every component of the style guide—from navigation menus and hero images to banners, buttons, and cards—as custom Beaver Builder modules.
Along with the custom modules, Zeek designed a master Beaver Builder theme for the brand that blends seamlessly with the primary Edwards Lifesciences site. Together, the theme and modules provide a powerful, custom WordPress page builder that allows any agency with any level of technical skill to step in and create beautiful, branded microsites and landing pages.
With drag-and-drop capabilities, the content modules can be added and arranged in any configuration desired so while every microsite will use the same base platform, the sites and individual pages will still remain unique.
A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor displays the content as it appears on the front-end of a website, so publishers can see exactly what the content will look like when published as they work.
The Powerful Results
Today, when Edwards Lifesciences onboards a new marketing and communications agency partner, they are provided with an official Edwards Lifesciences web publishing package that includes WordPress, the custom Beaver Builder theme, and all custom brand modules.
Once installed, the agency has everything they need to create complex page layouts and beautiful, informative, engaging microsites aligned with the Edwards brand style guide. What’s even better is that by leveraging Beaver Builder, agencies can work faster and accomplish their goals with greater ease without ever touching a line of code or engaging expensive development resources.
The 2018 Sustainability Report microsite was one of the first microsites built using the new Edwards Lifesciences custom Beaver Builder and WordPress powered publishing package. With this solution in place, the company now enjoys visual consistency across all microsites, a simplified publishing process, and a stable, reliable WordPress-powered technical foundation.
From large-scale digital publishing and media sites to high-traffic eCommerce, membership, and online course sites, to complex integrations with smartphone apps, the team at Zeek Interactive has done it all. When combined with our experience in platform technologies such as WordPress, Drupal, and Laravel, we can help you discover, design, and engineer the right solution for your unique needs.