About The Project

Take It Offline (TIO) is a Digital Marketing Roundtable website that provides face-to-face interactions and collaborative learning opportunities. To enhance its digital presence, we paired SvelteKit and Sanity CMS. Together, they delivered a modern, scalable, and interactive platform. SvelteKit ensured exceptional performance and responsiveness, while Sanity provided a flexible, easy-to-use CMS. This powerful combination elevated user experience, boosted event participation, and strengthened community engagement.

The Challenges

• Inaccessible Ticket Booking: The ticket booking system was not on the front-end for the users to find from the TIO website, which led to low event participation.
• Low User Engagement: The previous platform failed to effectively capture and retain user attention, leading to minimal interaction with events, speakers, and other content like blogs.
• Outdated UI/UX Design: The website’s interface was not visually appealing or user-friendly, resulting in a confusing and monotonous user journey. 
• Restrictive Technology: The previous legacy CMS lacked flexibility and scalability, which limited the site’s customisation options.
• Limited Speaker and Event Visibility: Key information about speakers and events was poorly organised and difficult to navigate.
• Poor SEO Performance: Inefficient content structuring and slow page loads negatively impacted search engine rankings, limiting the platform's reach and visibility on the web.
• Content Management Challenges: The previous CMS made updating or managing content time-consuming and labour-intensive.
• Performance and Load Times: Slow page load speeds and poor technical architecture contributed to higher bounce rates.

The Goal

The goal of "Take It Offline" (TIO) was to create an engaging, user-friendly platform that streamlines event management, enhances speaker and event visibility, and fosters user interaction along with SEO enhancement and Site performance. By addressing technical and user experience challenges, TIO aimed to establish itself as a centre for collaborative learning digital marketing and SEO enthusiasts, both online and offline.

Our Solutions

As a headless development agency, our approach to the "Take It Offline" (TIO) project was centred around leveraging a modern framework, SvelteKit and a headless CMS, Sanity, to deliver an interactive, high-performance platform tailored to the unique needs of the community-driven initiative. These technologies allowed us to address the user-facing challenges and the internal content management pain points, ensuring a seamless experience for end-users and admins.

Easier Ticket Accessibility Led to Higher Conversion

The event ticket booking option on the TIO website faced accessibility issues, making it challenging for users to navigate to the third-party booking platform. This difficulty often resulted in low conversion rates.

To address this, we enhanced the accessibility of the existing booking system by making it easier for users to navigate to the platform where bookings are handled. We streamlined the user flow using SvelteKit's dynamic routing capabilities, simplifying the steps required to reach the booking system and ensuring real-time availability updates.

UI/UX Enhancement

The previous platform's outdated and cluttered design made navigation difficult and lowered user engagement. There was also a lack of interactivity, and users found it hard to quickly access relevant content, leading to a poor browsing experience.

Using SvelteKit, we overhauled the UI/UX design to create a more interactive, dynamic, and responsive user experience. Its component-based architecture enabled us to craft a simplified interface with minimal load times. We incorporated smooth transitions, intuitive navigation, and modern design principles, ensuring users could easily find what they needed. By directly updating the DOM, SvelteKit reduced processing overhead, improved responsiveness, and minimised bundle sizes, resulting in faster load times. This lightweight approach significantly boosted site speed, reduced bounce rates, and ultimately increased user satisfaction and a better experience for TIO's audience.

Improvement of Speaker Profiles

Speaker profiles were difficult to update from the backend, lacked in-depth information, and were hard to navigate for users looking for specific speaker information. The limited profile details made it challenging for users to make informed decisions about attending events.

With Sanity CMS, we created a flexible and customisable speaker profile structure that included detailed biographical information, links to social profiles, photos, featured blogs, and event history. Sanity's custom schema creation enabled us to define a robust data model that could be easily updated in real time. Additionally, SvelteKit's dynamic rendering displayed these profiles seamlessly, allowing users to browse speaker information quickly and efficiently, enhancing the overall user experience.

Dynamic Content and Media Display

The website had limited content visibility, inefficient content structuring, and slow page load speeds, which led to poor user engagement and negatively impacted search engine rankings. Also, the previous CMS has made content updates and management time-consuming and labour-intensive, further blocking the platform's reach on the web.

To resolve this, we implemented a dynamic event display system using SvelteKit’s routing system, which automatically adjusted based on the latest updates. Users can easily redirect to the third-party ticket platform, ensuring maximum conversion. Additionally, Sanity CMS allowed for easy updates to event information, so the platform’s content was always fresh and accurate. By using Sveltekit and Sanity CMS, we significantly improved content discoverability and event visibility.

To resolve this, we implemented a dynamic content management and media distribution system in the backend using Sanity CMS, allowing the admin/editor to add, update, and publish content with custom components. In the front-end, users can easily discover, read, and engage with the contents throughout the website- thanks to Sveltekit’s CDN-agnostic library for content display and media interaction.

Other Enhancements

• Speaker and Blog Lists: Comprehensive lists of speaker profiles and blog articles, making it simple for users to explore content.
• Automated Carousels: Dynamic content displays automatically update to keep users engaged with the latest information.
• Buildable Pages: Flexible page structures allow for customisation without heavy development involvement, enabled by SvelteKit’s streamlined routing capabilities.
• Newsletter Subscription: The simplified options for users to subscribe and receive updates boost community engagement.
• Filtered Navigation: Enhanced navigation features enable users to filter through blogs and resources effortlessly, improving the user journey.

Choosing SvelteKit for Front-end Optimisation

SvelteKit was implemented to build fast and pre-built front-end components efficiently. Svelte is the core premise for the front-end. By compiling components into minimal JavaScript code, SvelteKit allowed for quicker page loads and smoother transitions, enhancing overall user engagement. Its flexibility in handling dynamic routing and server-side rendering (SSR) ensured faster content delivery and an optimised user experience.

SvelteKit was chosen for its lightweight, highly performant nature, which perfectly aligned with TIO’s need for better content showcasing. The direct manipulation of the DOM (instead of using a virtual DOM like React) resulted in quicker page loads and a smoother user experience. This, combined with SvelteKit’s minimal boilerplate code and comprehensive built-in features (like routing, SSR, and static site generation), enabled us to quickly deliver a scalable and maintainable solution.

Choosing Sanity CMS for Improved Content Management Experience

TIO’s previous site was built on outdated technology, which was restrictive regarding performance, scalability, and flexibility. The old CMS couldn’t easily accommodate new features or adapt to user feedback, leading to a stagnant user experience.

Sanity’s decoupled structure (Sanity Content Lake) allowed content to be easily reused across various platforms and devices. At the same time, SvelteKit’s SSR and SSG capabilities enabled us to build a high-performing site that can scale as the user base grows. This flexibility ensured that TIO could continuously enhance the platform without worrying about outdated content delivery bottlenecks.

Results and Impact

The "Take It Offline" project saw substantial positive outcomes from these implementations:

• Increased User Engagement: Better UI/UX and faster load times have made user interactions more frequent and meaningful.
• Enhanced Community Presence: The platform has cultivated a stronger sense of community, enabling users to connect and share knowledge effectively.
• Effective Knowledge Sharing: By facilitating discussions during offline events, the site has become a valuable resource for sharing experiences and insights, further boosting user engagement.

Conclusion

The "Take It Offline" project transformed a restrictive setup into a dynamic, responsive platform with SvelteKit and Sanity as headless CMS. This upgrade boosted performance, scalability, and user experience, driving community engagement and business growth.