The 10,000 hour project

or How we created an industry-leading website driving sales, growth, and a global acquisition.

COMPANY PROFILE

W‑Systems was a top national provider of transformational sales and marketing technology based on CRM and marketing automation. Certified experts and undisputed #1 Global SugarCRM Partners.

The company was acquired by SugarCRM in 2019.

Summary

The short story: W‑Systems was our agency's very first customer. Thirteen years working together. We started creating old school monthly newsletters for them back in 2006. Then a website revamp, and another, and another, followed by a game-changing inbound strategy that led our clients to a leading positioning in the industry.

“The team at TakeFortyTwo is extremely professional and invested in always producing a quality website from the initial conception to the final delivery. They are open to new ideas and are always up for a challenge - I can't speak highly enough for them.”

SARAH FRIEDLANDER • MARKETING DIRECTOR

Highlights

A flagship client of our Fuego plan, W‑Systems hired us to become a true extension of their team and to help, ideate, strategize, design and develop improvements to their entire digital ecosystem.

Everything tailored.

Back in 2009 we migrated W‑Systems website from an old-fashioned, constricted content management system into ExpressionEngine. Once we were able to move past the limited concept of "pages" and "blogs", we took the website architecture to the next level. The content management system became an easy machinery for publishing case studies, articles, landing pages, lead capture forms, services, solutions, projects, case studies, reviews, and more.

By focusing exclusively on content, W‑Systems' marketing team was able to quickly ramp up their lead generation volume and achieve predictable revenue. Our job was to make sure that content automagically became beautifully designed and SEO rich.

End to end expertise.

W-Systems hired us to do everything an agency can do. As years went by, we kept pushing the boundaries of what we could do, and our client asked for new, fresh and interesting challenges. The resulting website was a massive collaboration that demanded our skills in design, development, SEO, strategy, content generation, information architecture, marketing and much more.

Teamwork for business growth.

This case study is as much about design and development, as it is about making friends. We became a seamlessly integrated part of the team. Slack ringing daily, as we were in touch with a few dozens of W‑Systems employees — our teammates! — sharing quick questions, requests or ideas. We learned their design preferences, their quirks, their birthdays and their relatives' names.

The peak of excellence for an agency, from our perspective, is to be able to distill our client's entire team's ideas into actionable tasks and projects that lead to positive results.

A ten year process. W-Systems Homepage, v1 versus v6.

Always adapting. Always growing.

Through thirteen years we performed multiple redesigns and replatforms. The website kept evolving, with each iteration becoming stronger and empowering lead generation, content strategy and user experience. From DNN to ExpressionEngine, and CraftCMS, we built a corporate website that started with a handful of pages, to a big, bold, expert portfolio with thousands of content entries. Always adjusting the design and adopting the latest trends, best practices, technical compatibilities and industry zeitgeist.

Happy Endings

They say you need to invest 10,000 hours into something to become an expert.

The last iteration of W‑Systems was quite an achievement for our team in terms of design, architecture, and sheer content volume with +5,000 content entries generating organic traffic, reputation and leads for our customers.

In November 2020, SugarCRM acquired W‑Systems. The end of a big adventure for us, and the beggining of a massive new one for our clients.