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Case study

Building a Headless CMS for the UK's leading Security and Risk Business

The brief

CornerStone GRG is an award-winning, independent risk, cyber, and security consulting firm providing a range of Risk Management, Security Design and Implementation Management Services, all over the world. 

Recognising that outdated silos within security and risk management structures were no longer suitable for today’s complex businesses, they began to pioneer a holistic approach to improve the results they deliver, which naturally diversified their services. 

To facilitate this reposition, they engaged Batur Digital to reposition their brand, and build a new website with underlining marketing technologies to promote the new identity. 

CornerStone wanted a contemporary and highly flexible website that harnessed the power of the latest possible ‘build’ techniques. From our first engagement, it was clear that not only did Batur have the expertise in the latest wed development techniques, their process was all about understanding our business and client type. This ensured that the eventual website would closely match our expectations and meet the many criteria that we had set down.
Jon Roadnight CSyP
Director, Cornerstone GRG

Business Strategy

With 14 years of business behind them and an industry reputation, CornerStone’s revised messaging and market shift would need to be carefully constructed. To accommodate this, Batur began our work with a deep immersion into the industry, conducting research into immerging markets, trends, buying signals, keyword difficulty and much more. 

From our findings, we crafted a new messaging framework to articulate the transition from CornerStone’s two prevailing service verticals, to a holistic proposition that better served their customers and offered commercial reward. 

Choosing the technology

As Cyber Security experts, CornerStone wanted to lead by example by placing an emphasis on its data security. Typically, Content management platforms targeted toward SME markets are comprised of hundreds of integrations to proprietary software which increase the likelihood of security breaches. 

To mitigate against this, we opted for a ‘Headless’ approach. Best described as a composable solution, a ‘Headless’ approach leverages the composability of best in class technologies to create a bespoke website stack to meet functionality, flexibility, and configuration requirements. 

Since a headless CMS decouples the frontend interface and backend systems and doesn’t render content itself, it reduces the surface area for cyberattacks to target, making it is easier to prevent attacks and increase security. 

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How it all came together

Design

Our aim was to take CornerStone’s new website from a passive brochure site to an active lead generation tool that provides sales teams with a steady stream of prospects. We achieved this by educating users on key topics and positioning CornerStone’s team as thought leaders with the incorporation of blogs, white papers, and events, all available through email registration.

To structure this information in a way that is consumable, we reinvented the information architecture to reflect the RIBA project stages starting from ‘Plan’ and moving through Design, Implementation, Intelligence and Advisory services. This intuitive navigation creates a sense of progression through the site and reduces the bounce rate. 

Scalability

As the ambition is to scale the business, the website needed to be designed to keep pace. Rather than re-building every few years, we built a platform with longevity by allowing it to be maintained by non-technical team members. 

We achieved this by configuring visual building blocks and composable layout templates that let the internal team quickly create and deploy new pages. With the addition of user roles, permissions, and live role back functions built-in, this configuration also created efficiencies within the team and mitigates against any mistakes. 

Discoverability

To increase the discoverability we first focused on technical performance markers such as content paint, time to interact and other indicators of loading speeds, a factor Google takes into weighted consideration while ranking results. 

Fortunately, when sites are built with a headless architecture there’s no need for a database or server and the associated data requests. Instead, the frontend can be deployed directly to a Content Delivery Network and the pre rendered pages are delivered at blistering speed. 

To support this discoverability, we then shifted our focus on to incorporating fields for meta descriptions and content mark up within each content block, allowing Google to crawl the entire site for rich and relevant results. 

Email and CRM

Finally, we integrated HubSpot as a CRM solution to serve the marketing forms and deliver the downloadable content to users. This clever integration directly to the application reduced the cost by also acting as a management platform for the GDPR, Cookies, and Privacy opt in requirements. 

This system also is now the main interface for the sales team to use for lead generation, email marketing, and monitoring key metrics. 

Due to the nature of our business, the security of our website was imperative. The Batur team provided lots of information to enable us to fully evaluate any associated risks and make a fully informed decision. They hosted workshops to take our technical team through the “composable” architecture and ensured that we were completely at ease with the structures and platforms involved. Working with Batur has been a pleasure. They have produced a website that perfectly aligns with our business needs and provides us with a lead generation mechanism that was part of our project brief”.
Jon Roadnight CSyP
Director, CornerStone GRG

Summary

The need for professional service organisations to create secure web experiences away from outdated platforms is growing, and with it is the expectations from both search engines and users, that your website performs to the highest of standards. 

Fortunately, the investment into these technologies comes with a host of benefits, including an opportunity to stand out in your industry and capture more leads.  

If you’re looking to invest in future proofing your business, you can download our guide to Headless CMS below, or reach out for a free consultation. 

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Headless CMS: A solution for Security Driven Businesses

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