Connell Guides: Boosting Performance & Security on Drupal 7

Connell Guides creates guidebooks that help students of different ages gain a better understanding of important novels, poems, and plays included in the main English syllabi. The Connell Guides subscription service offers access to e-book guides, literary discussions, and videos produced by Connell Guides themselves. Over time, Connell Guides sought our assistance in improving their website on multiple occasions. Initially, the Connell Guides website was constructed by another team using Drupal 7, but it faced challenges in terms of security and user interface issues.
The primary concern was addressing the underperforming functionality, which was the first priority as it posed a significant obstacle to business development. In addition to this, they began encountering security issues, including a significant influx of spam registration accounts and XSS attacks. These challenges had a negative impact on their business and became the second major task at hand.

Project Overview:

• Product: Website
• Scope of our work: Back-end, Front-end
• Technologies: Drupal 7, AWS, Javascript, HTML, CSS
• Team: Back-end Developer, Front-end Developer, Project Manager
• Timeline: 2 months

In a short amount of time, we successfully improved Connell Guides' website to help their business grow. We began by updating the technical part of the website to the latest version of Drupal to enhance security. To stop spam, we added a Captcha and fixed a problem related to XSS attacks. These changes allowed Connell Guides to manage subscriptions more smoothly and expand their business.

For the front-end part of the project, we worked on the HTML structure of various pages and improved the user interface and experience. We optimized the site to work well on different devices, ensuring it was responsive. We also adjusted the HTML structure to align with the Bootstrap framework and improved certain design elements to enhance the user experience based on our research.

Regarding the back-end, we ensured that the website was reliable, secure, and visually appealing. We migrated the website to a new domain, set up advanced Google Analytics for a better understanding of user behavior, updated the Drupal core and modules, and configured roles and permissions for the subscription service.

We successfully made all these improvements within a budget that was 18% smaller than originally planned. Despite the budget constraints, we significantly enhanced the website's quality. We managed to reduce the bounce rate to just 4% and increased user engagement on the page by 14%. These changes had a positive impact on the business, allowing them to meet their goals and continue providing excellent products to students. As a result, their business expanded, and they generated more revenue than before.