Deploying hundreds of customized client sites

Prudential Retirement provides customized websites for employees of the firm’s corporate retirement clients. These sites deliver critical information to retirement plan participants and play a key role in improving employees’ readiness for retirement. Managing these sites required significant time and resources and resulted in inconsistent quality, limiting the business’s ability to scale.

Additionally, as a retirement provider, Prudential is committed to making its websites accessible to all employees of the company’s client organizations. The business is also subject to a wide range of compliance and regulatory issues, raising the complexity of the challenge.  

Automated site-building: To help Prudential achieve its business objectives, VShift created an automated site-building and management solution. This site-builder generated sites that are re-branded within client brand guidelines, contain marketing- and compliance-approved content and can be managed by non-technical personnel. The site-builder presented a step-by-step process asking an administrator to answer a series of questions about the retirement plan. Based on the answers, the site-builder then produced a draft website requiring only minimal additional customization that could be performed as needed.

Guided WCAG accessibility evaluation: To facilitate accessibility reviews, VShift provided a tool enabling a Prudential employee with no specialized knowledge of web accessibility to conduct compliance reviews. The WCAG tool prompted the user to perform assessments for each webpage and recorded the results, facilitating assessments including color contrast ratios; heading level contiguousness; screen reader compatibility; mobile device usability; and video flashing issues.

Results: Nearly 300 client websites have been generated using the site-builder tool. Speed to market has been reduced from a period of months to as little as two weeks. Person-hours required have been reduced by 90%. And sites produced through the site-builder are WCAG AA compliant, with no remediation required.