The Client Established in 1885, Gleeds is one of the world's leading independent construction and property consultancies. Steering clients, like Marks & Spencer, towards sound and future-proof property investments. Now in operation for 130 years, Gleeds operates 79 offices in 20 countries across 6 continents, and its construction and property expertise has been instrumental in delivering large-scale infrastructure projects that have caught the attention of the world, such as London 2012 and Crossrail.  

The Background 

As an international property and construction consultancy, Gleeds operates in multiple territories around the world. Projecting the business's local market knowledge has been instrumental in the company's 130-year growth.   

Growing their brand in new regional locations however had resulted in Gleeds owning and operating 15 unique websites, each of which was autonomously managed by a local market stakeholder. This had created an inconsistent voice across the Gleeds portfolio, while the CMS (now long outdated) was causing frustration among the company's content editors.  

The objective 

Achieve a unified and consistent brand voice across all markets globally, through personalised and localised delivery of content. 

Empowering Gleeds with an enterprise grade CMS We identified the best way to unify Gleeds' global operations would be by consolidating its existing 15 sites into one centralised website, capable of serving each local market equally. Through our audit of the requirements and experience with available CMS technologies, we quickly established that an enterprise grade CMS would offer Gleeds the best solution for managing their global communications. Further audits identified Episerver as the best platform to support the dynamic interface our new website design for Gleeds required. With approval from the Gleeds board we proceeded with building Gleeds a new online home, created through the Episerver platform. 

Consolidating fifteen individual sites into one 

Taking into account the complexity of consolidating 15 websites into one, we conducted a full UX and UI site audit to extract key insights about page importance. These findings helped us design a site navigation, tailored to the needs of the global Gleeds audience. While our digital design team focused on the frontend identity of the new website, our development team built Gleeds an entirely new backend from scratch, with the functionality to recognise each users' geographical location by their respective IP address. We created a homepage that responsively tailors its content to each unique site visitors' country of origin, ensuring that localised market-relevant information is always presented.  

Building a brand new integrated careers platform As part of our overhaul of Gleeds' UX and sitemap we redesigned their careers page based on the analytics data we extracted. Together with giving careers a new home on the Gleeds website, we also incorporated a third party resourcing application into the design, equipping Gleeds with a powerful new online resourcing portal. With this integrated functionality the global employer now has a centralised system to manage its resourcing requirements across 79 international offices. Revolutionising the speed and efficiency of Gleeds' global recruitment drive and candidate applications.  

Successfully streamlining group-wide communication 

With the new website now live, Gleeds finally has an integrated platform that satisfies the needs of its regional stakeholders, and keeps global communication consistent. Workflow integrations, built into the backend of the CMS, ensures no content can go live without the prior approval of Gleeds' central corporate communications team, who, for the first time, have complete visibility over all content published. Not only has this helped the brand move forward with one consolidated voice but, thanks to the bespoke functionality we developed, Gleeds also has a website that better supports its business.