The PotashCorp reengineering

It’s every developer’s dream: a clean slate. Ditch the old code and the old way of doing things and start fresh. That was the case with the recent reengineering of PotashCorp’s website.

As is the standard approach with this particular client, zu took on a development role in the project. PotashCorp and Creative Fire were on the planning and designing end, and zu offered technical expertise and programming.

“Given the critical importance of our website in excellent stakeholder communications, success or failure in creating a brand new site depended entirely on the strength of the project team,” commented Tim Herrod, Director of Treasury at PotashCorp. “The best websites are a product of the best ideas and execution, and exceptional performance flows only when talented, dedicated people understand, share, and deliver on our vision for excellence. These are the qualities of the zu team, and we have always been fortunate to have such world-class talent locally, working with us.”

About PotashCorp
PotashCorp is the world’s largest fertilizer company and leading potash producer, responsible for approximately 20% of global capacity. With operations in seven countries, PotashCorp is an international enterprise and a key player in meeting the growing challenge of feeding the world.

The goal
Websites go stale quickly. A leader in online investor relations, PotashCorp wanted a website with a cleaner interface, simpler navigation, more consistency for users and lower maintenance costs. From a development perspective, the goal of the project was to reengineer the code to make the site more stable, easier to maintain, and easier to build upon.

Having struggled through cumbersome updates on the site in the past, creating an easy-to-maintain system with lower maintenance costs was a high priority for the development team. The team strived to offer the client a platform in which they could perform updates easily. Part of this involved the integration of zu’s own content management system (CMS), EasyUpdater, which allowed the client to make changes to parts of the site that would require regular updating such as news, career postings, and calendar events.

The challenge
Meeting tight deadlines and coordinating amongst three parties proved to be the greatest challenges during the project. These were addressed in regular meetings between the parties and through enhancing internal systems. zu’s sizable talent base was also used to the team’s advantage, providing the ability to scale up and add additional support as needed.

With a looming deadline and a massive project to tackle, morale was kept high with zu-supplied dinner breaks when working late and the occasional night out after a long day. With some dedicated employees and solid leadership, the team plowed through.

The solution
To achieve the goal of building a system that would be easy to maintain and update, zu expanded the EasyUpdater CMS and modified it to provide needed flexibility while maintaining consistency and reducing costs.

A “flexibly consistent” system was the outcome. It was achieved by using a template-container-block approach to building the pages of the site in which each page was a template with multiple containers. In each container, the user could place any block. A block might be a piece of content, a list, a career posting, a news article, or an upcoming event. The user can create and edit only one block (for consistency), but a block can be placed in any location on the page (for flexibility).

New features
The freshly updated, easy-to-use site, inspired the launch of some additional features:

• DataTool: This allows investors to browse through financial data in the four key areas of financial, sustainability, facilities, and markets. They can select data to graph, export, share, or even save to a personal MyPOT account that can be revisited.
• News: This section has taken on a blog-like approach with all news items, regardless of category, falling into one global news section, allowing visitors to access all company news in one location or filter news postings according to topic.
• Social media: PotashCorp took the opportunity to dive further into the world of social media by linking to two Twitter accounts, @PotashCorp for news and @PotashCorpJobs for career postings; two Facebook pages, one for news and one for careers; and a YouTube page which provides an opportunity for videos to be more widely distributed.

The results
Since the project has launched, PotashCorp has received positive user feedback about the site’s new features. Looking at three month comparative data before and after the launch, site visits increased by 11% and page views grew by 14%.

Overall
The PotashCorp redesign shows how taking care of foundational aspects of websites such as navigation and user interface can transform a site from being merely available to being useful and frequently visited. This philosophy should apply to all web projects, regardless of the project size or budget.

PotashCorp continues to be a leader in online investor relations by adding new features and improvements on an ongoing basis, acknowledging that in the web world, a site is never finished.