Boxed Content Management
Creating a scaleable solution for Boxed’s content rich pages.
The Problem
Since all our landing pages at Boxed were hard-coded, there was no way for marketing to feature campaigns on the website without weeks of advance notice and developer time. In addition to needing a place to feature our seasonal campaigns, the company was undergoing a period of monetization. We needed to come up with a creative way to sell space on the site without compromising Boxed’s brand or selling ads. Later, at the request of our SEO expert, we decided that it would make the most sense for Boxed’s blog content to fall under our URL rather than using an external Squarespace account.
Timeline
The Solution
Partnering with the merchandising and marketing teams, we were able to create a system where non-developers could build Seasonal pages within our internal tools admin. We designed Brand pages that would allow companies to purchase dedicated landing pages that users could shop directly from. We also used the same tech to create a brand directory, a collective list of all the brand pages we created, for ease of customer discovery. When bringing our blog in house, we decided that for both tech and UX reasons, we should use the same framework as Brand and Seasonal pages, and take the opportunity to improve the existing experience.
Previous Design
The first iteration of our Seasonal pages was based off a hard-coded custom page made by Product Design Manager, Jillian Crudo.
Finding the Product Needs
Using that design as the basis for Seasonal and Brand pages, I did an audit to see how we could make the template scalable across multiple different pages. The product and marketing teams needed to be able to change color, text, backgrounds, and images depending on the campaign or brand. The modules also had to be interchangeable and flexible enough that they could line up in many different combinations without breaking.
Onboarding docs & teaching non-devs to build pages
Part of future-proofing this feature was maintaining good documentation about how the pages are built and how to create content that’s appropriate for these pages. The templates that marketing and product have used has changed over the years, but in September of 2018, the company began keeping documentation on Notion.so and I created a how-to page for people to reference when building these pages.
Select responsive Brand and Seasonal pages
Integrating the Boxed Blog into our CMS
In May 2018, we decided to bring the Boxed blog onto the boxed.com website. Previously, the marketing team had been using a Squarespace with its own domain. At the suggestion of our new SEO specialist, it made sense to integrate everything into the Boxed product. We could now control all the SEO traffic, and the user could shop directly from the blog they were reading.
Requirements and Competitive Research
Prepping the existing infrastructure for Blog and synthesizing feedback from the teams
I needed to make sure that the existing modules and Seasonal and Brand pages worked well with the incoming Blog designs.
Final annotated mockups of Blog
Going forward
Brand, Seasonal, and Blog pages have brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for Boxed’s website. Analysis shows that users who spend time on these pages tend to be better customers with higher monetary cart value than the average user. In addition to customers shopping from these pages, large corporate brands like Dove, P&G, Mondelez, and Hershey pay the company directly to set up and maintain these pages.
Going forward, we would want to continue improving and adding modules. The ability to display rich content in new and exciting ways improves both the customer’s experience but also allows us to better feature Boxed’s brand and marketing initiatives.
See Blog Pages • See Brand Pages • See our On Sale page that uses Seasonal Page tech
