Lynton built SAPinsider's WordPress templates in two phases, 2021 and 2022

The Customer

SAPinsider is a media and membership community for SAP professionals. It publishes articles and reports, runs events and webinars, and keeps a directory of vendors that serve its members.

The site ran on WordPress, with the theme held in the company’s own GitHub repository. SAPinsider had already produced its new designs and global styles in Adobe XD when it came to Lynton in August 2021.

The Challenge

SAPinsider needed a developer who would build its designs into its existing theme, to its files, with no redesign. The first phase was development only.

A year later the brief changed shape. The publisher wanted a new homepage and five topic landing pages for the subject areas it calls big tent topics. The model was Bloomberg, where each main category has a slightly different layout. Each topic page had to collect webinars, articles, reports and ads, with five ad spaces built into the template. The homepage was to lead with the big tent topics, give events a larger slot, and present headlines as problems that link to the article with the answer, in place of a plain feed.

The Solution

In phase one we took SAPinsider’s Adobe XD files and developed the global styles, header and footer into the theme repository. On that base we built nine templates: the homepage, the blog listing, the article page, the vendor directory, the vendor detail page, Become a Member, About SAPinsider, Careers and an amended vendor showcase. Every template was checked in native browsers and in BrowserStack before it went to the client for testing.

The first set went to production on September 29, 2021. The second set followed on November 19, 2021, after the client’s revisions. That round added an alphabetical filter to the vendor showcase and a link through to a full vendor directory, with premium vendors listed at the top and the rest below in shorter form. We handed over site documentation, led by image size recommendations for the editors.

In phase two, from August 2022, Lynton did the design as well as the build. We wireframed a homepage and five big tent templates, each with up to six modules, from a recorded brief with the client. The design comps sat on the global styles already in place. The homepage has a header that stays transparent until the reader scrolls. Editors pick it from the list of page templates, enter content through Advanced Custom Fields, and curate each module by choosing a post type and then a post. The big tent and featured events modules take as many rows as the editor adds.

Each of the six templates went through code review, design review and cross-browser testing before acceptance, then two rounds of client testing that closed on November 18, 2022.

What They Got

SAPinsider’s editors can build a topic hub or a homepage from the page template list and fill it themselves, choosing which webinar, article or report sits in each slot. Ad inventory is part of the layout, with five spaces on every topic page.

The vendor directory gives members one place to find every vendor, with the premium listings first and a filter by letter. The 2021 templates went to production on the dates above; the phase two templates were accepted through client testing in November 2022.

Wrapping Up

The standard here was to build on what the client already had. SAPinsider kept its theme, its repository and its global styles, and gained templates its own team could run. Every template was tested across browsers and accepted by the client before it was called done.

Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.