A growing fitness technology company serving different markets
EGYM develops connected strength-training equipment and software for fitness clubs, gyms and physical therapy settings. Its products are used by operators and employers across Europe and North America, so the company needed a website that could explain a varied technology offering to different audiences and in different languages.
By early 2020, EGYM was preparing a new multilingual site. The marketing team needed to publish and rearrange pages without asking developers to build each one, while the underlying platform had to manage regional content and European privacy requirements. The challenge wasn’t simply to reproduce a set of designs. It was to create a content system that people inside EGYM could keep using after launch.
EGYM continued expanding during the engagement. By September 2021, the company reported more than 13,000 facilities worldwide using its products and announced a $41 million Series E round. Those were company milestones, not results of the website project.
A partner agency led the design and overall client relationship. SLIDEFACTORY worked alongside that agency as the technical development team, building the Drupal components and publishing setup, then staying on to maintain and extend the platform. Our work with EGYM began with a short product-video edit in January 2020; the website build started the following month.
Choosing components the marketing team could use
EGYM’s marketers needed control over the content without having to ask a developer to assemble every new page. The site used Drupal 8 on Acquia Cloud with Acquia Cohesion, now called Site Studio, so the key development decision was which reusable components the marketing team would have available.
Working with the partner agency that led design, we reviewed wireframes, estimated the components and walked designers through how each piece would behave in the page builder. When the scope changed during planning, we updated the estimates and documented the development process. We then worked through four two-week sprints in Jira to implement heroes, carousels, image-and-copy arrangements, statistics, comparisons, checklists, grids and a blog gallery. The editor included help text explaining when to use each component, making the design system practical for EGYM’s own team.
Launching in several languages at once
The initial launch covered US, UK and international versions, with additional languages planned. Alongside the page components, we configured language-specific domains, hreflang tags for search engines and geo-IP routing to the appropriate region. A teaser microsite went up in March 2020 while work on the full site continued.
We also established a consistent deployment path using Composer, Acquia Pipelines and configuration synchronization for Drupal and Cohesion. Changes could move through development, staging and production rather than being assembled differently on each environment. EGYM’s production site launched on June 15, 2020, about four months after platform work began. We addressed the immediate post-launch issues and handed over the CMS with documentation at the end of June.
Staying on after launch
Getting the site live was one milestone. Keeping it useful for the marketing team became the longer part of the engagement. EGYM moved to a support agreement in July 2020, and we continued as the technical team for another 18 months. As the business added content and campaigns, we built a language selector that remembered visitors’ choices, notification banners, expandable and quotation components, paginated blog cards, sharing controls, a careers subdomain, product landing pages and structured-data markup.
The site’s marketing integrations evolved alongside those additions. We connected Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and Pardot, recorded referral sources on Pardot forms, added interaction tracking to carousels and expanders, and corrected LinkedIn and Twitter previews. Because the site served European audiences, we also implemented translated Cookiebot notices and consent controls for embedded videos and other content, later extending them to additional regions.
Long-term support involved infrastructure as well as page features. We added Memcache, tuned PHP, addressed Acquia audit findings and worked with its support team on CDN and caching issues. When the production site experienced an outage in March 2021, we restored it that day, documented the cause and followed up with Acquia. Regular Drupal security work led into a Drupal 8-to-9 upgrade in late 2021, including Composer and PHP updates, path alias corrections and pipeline repairs. The Drupal 9 site was deployed in December 2021.
A website the team could keep building on
EGYM’s multilingual website went live on June 15, 2020, with a library of reusable Drupal components and a publishing workflow its marketing team could use after handoff. Launch wasn’t the end of our work together. Under an 18-month support agreement, we added campaign and language features, maintained consent and tracking integrations, addressed production issues and brought the site onto Drupal 9 in December 2021.
Across the January 2020 to December 2021 engagement, we recorded about 1,280 hours, including an initial video edit and the subsequent website development and support. The partner agency led design and the client relationship, while we built and maintained the technical platform. What began as a new website became a working CMS and an ongoing development relationship as EGYM’s needs changed.
