Website Update – September 1

From decreasing the size of our backlog to pushing forward with website improvements and brand migrations, we have made significant progress since our last update. Multiple unexpected technological hurdles slowed us down, but we are now doing user acceptance testing (UAT) for the new Mark, Winona and Gotham websites. Mark and Winona should be ready to deploy next week and Gotham should be ready the following week. Here’s a quick update on our web work, improvement projects and site migrations.

Backlog
While web work continues to flow in at full pace, with the help of our two contractors, we have been able to bring our backlog into a more manageable state. This week we were down to 150 backlog items, compared to 207 the week before. The web team completed a total of 303 requests over the last two weeks.

Improvement Projects
We are making progress in improving the user’s experience when searching for products on acuitybrands.com. We plan to start an update next week that will affect the product filters, specifically the order of filters and the attribute values within the filters.

With this update, numerical attributes will be displayed in the correct numerical order, based on the complete number rather than each digit. (For instance, rather than 1 being followed by 10, 11, 12, etc., 1 will now be followed by 2, 3, 4, etc.) And we’ll also be able to display certain attributes in order of relevancy, an improvement that kept eluding us until we discovered a bug in the system that had been preventing the relevancy order from sticking.

In addition, we believe that we have discovered another bug that is preventing some product data attributes from being recognized by the search tool, due to the way that data is combined into larger data sets. We are working to address this issue. Once it is fully resolved, this should have a significant impact in improving search and filter results.

Migration of Architectural Brands
As noted in our opening, we are now in the UAT phase for the new Mark, Winona and Gotham websites and, if all goes well, deployment should happen by late next week for Mark and Winona. And, Gotham should deploy the week following. Here is an updated schedule:

• Mark – User testing has begun; launch is scheduled for the week of Sept. 4.
• Winona – User testing has begun; launch is scheduled for the week of Sept. 4.
• Gotham – User testing has begun; launch is scheduled for the week of Sept. 11.
• Healthcare Lighting – Launch is now projected to be the week of Sept. 18.

We are currently working on our first-quarter plan for FY18. As part of that, we will be identifying which sites will be prepared next for migration. Look for more on that in upcoming posts.

We appreciate all of the input and feedback that we have received and ask that you continue to provide your suggestions. Send feedback or meeting requests to daniel.englebretson@acuitybrands.com.

Thank you,
The Acuity Brands Web Team