Blue Acorn iCi transforms its website in just 3.5 weeks with Adobe Edge Delivery Services

All content starts with an idea. A spark of imagination, perhaps written down on a scrap of paper or in an online document. That idea is transformed into a headline, carefully crafted into a webpage, a blog post, an article, or even an entire website.

The path from idea to launch, however, can include platform limitations and process inefficiencies. Blue Acorn iCi, an Adobe Platinum Solution Partner, realized its website wasn’t serving the agency the way it should. The partner began searching for a platform that would help increase lead generation to drive new business and more accurately reflect its brand.

While attending Adobe Summit, Blue Acorn iCi learned about Adobe Edge Delivery Services, a groundbreaking way for marketers and less technical people to easily author and publish web content. Edge Delivery Services are available with Adobe Experience Manager Sites, an industry-leading content management system (CMS).

Seeing the potential for these new services, the partner chose to use the platform to reimagine and migrate the agency's website from its current content management system, WordPress.

For many marketing teams, writing content for their website often occurs in Google Docs or Microsoft Word documents. Translating copy and design from those applications to HTML for a traditional CMS takes valuable time away from the team. But with Edge Delivery Services, Blue Acorn iCi's team can author and publish content using the tools they work in every day.

“My team creates content in Google Docs, and hearing how Edge Delivery allows us to stay in the tools we are familiar with and deliver great user experiences on the frontend got us excited to migrate to [Adobe Experience Manager Sites using] Edge Delivery Services for our own website,” says Emily Wilhoit, Chief Marketing Officer at Blue Acorn iCi.

Similarly, in traditional website development, platforms can be built on difficult-to-manage, restrictive frameworks. These platform limitations increase development times, and any changes made to a project’s original scope can cause even further delays in publishing content. However, with Edge Delivery Services, the Blue Acorn iCi team was able to completely transform their processes into shorter, more agile cycles. This made the website redesign take a fraction of the time it would have taken if using a different platform.

“Because we weren’t dealing with the harder-to-use backend frameworks that we previously dealt with, our team of three was able to lift and shift our WordPress website in just three and a half weeks,” says Tyler Craft, Director of Adobe Commerce Cloud at Blue Acorn iCi.

To help developers efficiently create custom websites, Edge Delivery Services uses a modular content block system. With a selection of standard blocks, such as hero sections or text boxes, and the ability to quickly create custom blocks, the Blue Acorn iCi development team could do more in less time.

The platform's modularity also allowed the team to be more creative. New capabilities and content blocks could be introduced mid-project without significantly altering the development team's workload. This flexibility allowed them to easily and quickly tailor the site to suit the agency's and its website visitors' needs.

With a revamped website that better represents the agency's brand and streamlines development and content production processes, Blue Acorn iCi has entered a new era. The marketing team can now self-serve content creation and publishing, and requests for new pages take just hours for the development team to deliver instead of weeks. On top of that, the faster page load speeds enabled by Edge Delivery Services earned the newly migrated website a perfect Google Lighthouse score of 100.

While the agency was already well-versed in many Adobe solutions, such as Adobe Commerce, its use of Edge Delivery Services represents the partner’s first step into adopting Adobe Experience Manager Sites. With the successful website relaunch, the team looks forward to using the platform with additional Adobe solutions. Blue Acorn iCi also intends to use its experience migrating its own website to unlock new, innovative solutions and solve tougher challenges for clients.