The context
Founded in 2013, DataCamp’s mission is to democratize data science education for everyone. They provide more than 10 million users and 2,500+ companies worldwide a suite of digital products to let users learn online and find jobs that match their skills. With a big part of their engineering team based in Leuven, we defined a natural partnership to work on specific product objectives.
The challenge
Over the years, DataCamp’s online learning offering and content library have grown tremendously. During this rapid growth, some web engineering dimensions with regards to SEO and navigability were underserved. The DataCamp team mapped this out functionally and technically in a detailed manner and asked us to bring a team of 7 highly qualified engineers up to speed as part of their existing technical operations.
The product
Under the guidance of a DataCamp engineering manager we improved their sitemaps, optimised the navigation menu and linked all changes to a Strapi CMS to make sure their team can continuously update the necessary pages and elements over time. This was followed by developing multiple landing pages, promotional campaigns, and improving core web vitals.
Results
67%
traffic increase on featured pages in month after launching improved navigation functionality
85%
traffic increase for data science tracks in month after launching improved navigation functionality
300
webpages easily accessible in one click and ready for webcrawling
7
highly driven software engineers with eyes on delivery
In less than a month Panenco was able to setup an effective engineering team that quickly gained a solid understanding of our infrastructure, operating model and technology stack. A great combination of speed and qualitative delivery.
Peter Petermann
Engineering manager at DataCamp
01
Sitemap web app
Laying the groundwork for web crawlers
We kickstarted our partnership by creating a web application that automatically produces a full-blown sitemap, making sure search engines can find and crawl all of the website’s indexable pages.
A well maintained sitemap is crucial for a content-heavy platform like DataCamp to list and index all URLs from their site, manage hidden pages and assign crawl priority. Our solution is twofold:
1) An admin application allowing complete control of its content
2) A scraping service which automatically updates the sitemap with new content
02
Site navigation
Implementing a MegaMenu navigation model
The DataCamp design team conceptualised a new ‘MegaMenu’ navbar, enabling a better overview of their content and simultaneously improving web performance metrics. Even though the previous navigation bar only contained around 50 hyperlinks, we bundled over 300 hyperlinks into the renewed navigation structure.
We're dynamically predicting user intent based on hovering behaviour, leading to a 67% traffic increase to the featured pages in the MegaMenu within the first month after go-live.
03
Strapi CMS
Reducing turnaround time
In tandem with DataCamp engineers, we worked closely on the implementation of Strapi CMS. The goal is to give content creators all tools in hands to edit webpages, significantly reducing development overhead and thus turnaround time. We are currently still creating plugins and integrating Strapi across new initiatives.
Let's build!
Are you looking for an entrepreneurial partner to bring your digital ideas to life?Reach out at hello@panenco.com
