Upgrading Optimizely for Children's Hospital

If there’s one thing we know about healthcare facilities and children’s hospitals — and, trust us, we know a LOT after working with children’s hospital clients over the past decade — we know that constant improvement is the bare minimum of what’s accepted. Healthcare providers are constantly trained for new treatments, and facilities and equipment are continually renovated, expanded, and improved upon.

So, why should the primary tool for digital communication be any different?

Websites are dynamic, and they are certainly not stuck in time. Every content management system is built to serve a specific purpose at a specific point in time, with the assumption that as technology and content needs change, those taking care of the website will do the same through security updates and system upgrades. Thankfully, our children’s hospital clients — which include Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, among others — stayed ahead of the “staleness” with the recent upgrade to Optimizely 12.

In an upgrade like this — not just a significant upgrade for the CMS, but also a major upgrade for the underlying technology itself — the name of the game is “overhaul.” Our development team began by making adjustments within the code to work more seamlessly with an updated .NET Core framework, fixing and rewriting code while testing against potential bugs and unforeseen regression issues. Once we have optimized code for the new framework, we review the viability of custom code and external packages to minimize the overall effects.

Of course, the other big question that comes with a new upgrade: how much rework will I need to do? As templates change, functionality is updated, and old plugins and packages are made obsolete, what does an editorial team need to handle to make things run without a hitch? Thankfully for Lurie and our other children’s hospital clients, custom functionality and content needs were relatively unaffected by the upgrade — aside from some fields being on new tabs and some gentle rework of site functionality, editorial teams found themselves with an improved, but not drastically changed, editorial experience.

Beyond this, Blend’s QA team tirelessly worked to make sure every page was as close to the original as possible — a side-by-side review of every content type and block at minimum, with a direct side-by-side review of every major landing and general page across the site. We didn’t just want the house to look new - we wanted it to feel identical, yet improved.

Which means not only do our children’s hospital clients feel the benefits of upgraded security, faster performance, and an overall improvement in the CMS itself — they also got to do so with as little frustration as possible. If only every upgrade was as clear and construction-free as an Opitmzely upgrade.

Project results.

• Upgraded two key children’s hospitals to the most recent version: Optimizely 12
• Adjusted custom page templates and blocks to function as expected within the upgrade to Optimizely 12
• Confirmed page-by-page success of our Optimizely upgrades through QA and additional development