Publishing about.deere.com as the sole publisher for John Deere's corporate brand team has been, to-date, the largest project I have been responsible for.

Before the project even began, I was already respected as a subject matter expert on John Deere's previous content management systems: Teamsite and Akeneo (PIM), and was selected as part of a panel to select the new content management system Deere would leverage moving forward. As part of that panel, we reviewed demonstrations from multiple vendors and ultimately selected CoreMedia as the new CMS.

My role as Deere's only corporate brand publisher was anything but simple: I was tasked with being the first publisher to build the entire about.deere.com microsite from scratch leveraging the new CMS while components (the reusable building blocks used to create the site) were still undergoing development and constant changes.

It was no easy feat to build a website with ever-changing building blocks. Sometimes necessary options weren't developed yet or had simply been forgotten. There were frequently miscommunications between the UX team's design concepts and what was actually developed; a gap I continually helped close during weekly review sessions. Additionally, I was continually testing WCAG compliance with SiteImprove and providing feedback where changes were necessary to meet A/AA compliance levels, as legally required. I frequently experienced pushback from management where some design concepts had to be scrapped to meet the compliance level required, but I never let that discourage me from pushing forward to get the necessary changes.

Often my time was split between building new content and performing UAT (User Acceptance Testing) on components still in development. There were many times when the development team would push updates to components that would break content that was already previously completed, requiring rework and often debates on what the correct design/publishing options should be.

I also needed to solve image cropping issues in the new system, which allowed one to crop a single image for multiple aspect ratios. In theory this was great - except when images such as logos, "pop-out" effects, rounded edges, or other custom shapes came into play. The system would not allow easy cropping for such images, and I had to come up with a solution. I created a Photoshop template where three copies of the same image could be placed in specific aspect ratio zones, so that once uploaded as a single image to the CMS, the ratio cropping zones would never cut off the image content in any circumstance. This solution is still used by publishers to-date.

After the mircosite launched for the USA, it was a few short months before all Deere.com publishers began working on moving Deere.co.uk content into CoreMedia for the first full-site transition test. That meant I had to turn around and syndicate and adapt all about.deere.com content for the UK site. It was no easy feat - I was the only publisher to test the syndication tool, since only brand content was already in CoreMedia (Deere.com content was being manually published as I had originally done for about.deere.com). There were many issues with the syndication - wherein twice I had to manually delete my syndicated content in its entirty under the development team's instructions. Eventually, everything did work out and brand content went live with the rest of Deere's new UK site on-time.