Allconnect is a free resource that simplifies how you shop for home services. Learn how the UX team redesigned this website and innovated a new platform to make content updates easy and safe!

Overview
Allconnect is a free tool for home service shopping. They provide plans in your area, connecting you and millions of others to the best deals on internet, TV, home security, electricity and more. Allconnect offers customers a convenient single source to compare and connect integrated media, broadband, home protection, energy and green products. Allconnect’s services are available at allconnect.com, through utility and energy companies representing over 50 million households, and via affiliates.

At Allconnect®, we’re all about connecting you and millions of others to the best deals on internet, TV, home security, electricity and more.
Allconnect.com

Allconnect wanted to rebrand their website using UX methods. It was also an opportunity to upgrade their content management software for their “behind the scenes” users — content administrators.

The Challenge
As Senior Web Developer, I focused on discovering the pain points of the existing content management system by interviewing the administrators.

Pain Point #1: Difficult to update content. A great part of allconnect.com’s success is its high ranking in search engines. Content managers needed an easy way of rendering SEO content. I sat with content admins and watched them painfully try to complete their daily tasks. The simple task of copying and pasting text from a Word document became a nightmare as they tried to find the appropriate location in a giant field of HTML code. One missing semi-colon or closing tag and boom! the page failed to render.

Pain Point #2: Difficult to find content. Once the user created content, finding that content page again was another nightmare. The Drupal content listing page was set up to display all pages in a table using pager navigation in the footer . Now, imagine a site with almost 1000 pages in alphabetical order. Administrators wanted a search feature** and a way to sort content by content type.

Pain Point #3: Security Risk. Embedded in the sea of HTML was JavaScript code. This is particularly dangerous and goes against Drupal best practices. These scripts are saved to the Drupal database, leaving the page suceptible to web hacking techniques such as Cross Site Scripting and SQL injections. We had to provide a safe way to add content.

Particularly dangerous are