Their Success With Duda
Italiaonline (IOL) migrated 35,000 sites to Duda. Spotzer expedited the process, and continues to provide services to more than 60,000 IOL clients using Duda.
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5k+
new sites created each month
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60k+
website clients currently being serviced
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Ongoing white label fulfillment
The Opportunity
In early 2016, Italiaonline (IOL), the largest internet company and online directory in the European Union’s third largest economy, concluded that its proprietary website builder was simply too outdated to warrant the time and resource investment necessary to bring it up to speed.
“Our in-house site builder was a great solution when we first released it, but over time, the product became outdated and the cost-benefit ratio of updating it ourselves just didn’t make sense,” said Romolo Velati, Head of Product Development at Italiaonline.
“Instead, our team decided to partner with a website solutions provider that offered the flexibility and specialized tools needed to create amazing, cutting-edge websites at scale,” he said.
“We also wanted the benefit of working with a competitive, globally adopted platform that would strongly position Italiaonline as a highly competitive industry leader,” Velati added. “So those two main points essentially made up the criteria for whatever product we chose to replace our old website builder.”
But discovering, evaluating and selecting a new website builder to integrate into its service was only half the battle for Italiaonline.
The Italian directory also required the migratration of 35,000 of its existing clients’ websites onto the new platform in order to simplify account management and ensure all IOL customers receive the same level of excellent service.
However, migrating these websites efficiently at scale posed a variety of key challenges.
Whatever website solution Italiaonline chose, it had to facilitate this massive transfer of websites with minimal disruption to the company’s workflows and client accounts, and enable easy editing of the sites post-migration.
As it turned out, the solution IOL required was a combination of the industry’s leading web design platform, and an experienced team of design and development professionals to manage the migration.
Why Duda & Spotzer
After a thorough evaluation of the market’s leading website builders and online presence solutions, Italiaonline chose Duda as its technology provider, and Spotzer, a premier provider of digital marketing solutions for large enterprises that serve small businesses, as its web design fulfillment partner to do the heavy lifting during the migration.
“We picked Duda to replace our legacy website builder for a variety of reasons, but chief among them are the platform’s unique approach to responsive web design and track record of successful site migrations,” said Velati. “And Spotzer’s long history of building and managing small business websites, along with their deep experience working with Duda, made them the natural choice to provide migration services to our customers,” he added.
Migrating 35,000 Italiaonline Websites
After considering all of the migration strategies available, it was decided that Duda would create a custom plugin to be used by the Spotzer team to expedite the migration process.
At a deep level, Duda learned the structure, layout, and patterns of Italiaonline’s legacy website builder, and then highly customized its content import algorithm to work specifically with IOL.
This involved mapping the existing websites’ layouts into Duda’s row and column structure, replicating navigation and header styles, and ensuring all legacy widgets had a corresponding native widget in Duda.
After Italiaonline websites were run through the Duda plugin, Spotzer completed the migration by QAing each individual website, making any minor design edits if required, and communicating about the migration to IOL customers.
“Spotzer has a sophisticated onboarding process based on a customer segmentation approach where the communication methods are aligned to customer needs,” said Peter Urmson, CEO of Spotzer. “Each customer is contacted by our client managers for consultation about the process, a brief overview of what design updates and revisions are available, and, in some cases approval of the migration,” he said. “Additionally, we have automated email and SMS communications that guide and nurture Italiaonline customers through the migration process.”
Urmson also pointed out that Spotzer’s average migration time per website, including revisions and approval from the Italiaonline client, was just under one week.
“The entire migration initiative took roughly ten months to complete and was deemed an overwhelming success,” said Urmson. “Our team put a lot of effort into quality control throughout the process,” he said. “Every single customer has been spoken with at least once or twice to ensure they’re happy with their new website, and IOL’s churn rate has markedly improved.”
Post-Migration Success
Following the successful migration, IOL, Spotzer and Duda have continued their partnership to provide all new Italiaonline customers with a seamless white label onboarding experience and conversion-driving, beautiful websites.
“Every Italiaonline customer is provided with their own dedicated client manager for the duration of the website build,” said Urmson. “Their client manager is responsible for ensuring each customer gets a website designed and built for them that perfectly reflects their business, and helps them achieve their goals,” he continued.
As of 2018, Italiaonline and Spotzer provide service to more than 60,000 website clients using Duda’s industry-leading platform with that number continuing to tick upward.
“We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive experience working with Duda and Spotzer and now hold up web design as a key part of our core service offering that we market to clients,” said Velati. “This partnership has enabled Italiaonline to remain a leading competitor in the market with the best technology available, without putting undue strain on our internal resources,” he added. “These companies have simply been fantastic to work with.”
