A flexible CMS for a demanding youth portal

The archive of online articles is correspondingly large, and the long history of the portal was reflected in a complex page and menu structure.

The relaunch meant restructuring the existing content and moving it, cleanly formatted and without SEO ranking losses, from the outdated TYPO3 installation into the new CMS.

Clearer user guidance was also a core task, to make the service attractive again for its target groups of young people and teachers. The design had aged, the user experience was no longer up to date, and the current legal accessibility requirements were no longer met.

It was also important to improve the user experience for the growing editorial team: faster work on content and easier onboarding of new colleagues.

Flexibility, ease of use, performance, security: Statamic has everything needed to deliver a project of this scale and with these requirements efficiently.

For the search functions we rely on Meilisearch – just as powerful as Elasticsearch, but with far less configuration and maintenance effort.

During implementation, working closely with the UI/UX agency and the online editorial team, we avoided the typical pitfalls of a relaunch project. All disciplines worked hand in hand, and there were no serious problems or delays.

The decision for Statamic and against TYPO3 proved right again and again. Thanks above all to the better developer experience of Statamic and Laravel, we made big progress quickly; the reworks that are unavoidable in a project of this size barely affected the schedule.

As a result, the new portal went live on schedule at the end of the 2023 summer recess, after just six months of implementation.

Once again, Statamic's Laravel foundation proved a great advantage when writing the extensive migration scripts.

We implemented the portal design created by the partner agency responsively, to current standards. The accessibility of the new portal is confirmed by a passed BIK-BITV-Test.

The dip in search engine visibility often seen after relaunches did not occur: the automated redirects from the old to the new article URLs had the desired effect, and reach has been rising steadily since the relaunch.

In addition, the new concepts (interactive elements such as quizzes, comment sections, polls and a media library), the clearer menu navigation, the optimised information architecture and the improved search led to significantly more engagement from the target groups.

The online editorial team also quickly came to appreciate the benefits of Statamic: the tidy editing interface, the live preview and the revision history make day-to-day work much easier, and project-specific features were easy to integrate thanks to Statamic's flexibility.

This breathed new life into the portal's idea of making the work of parliament visible and understandable for young people. We are delighted to be part of this mission and continue to supply the platform regularly with technical improvements and new developments.