A long term customer, Cumhuriyet Anaokulu, a German/Turkish preschool in Izmir had been promoting their school using one of our EkspressWeb TYPO3 starter websites. As technology improved and with more people using mobile devices to view websites, they needed an upgraded design to reach these people as well as an upgraded version of the TYPO3 CMS framework.
Infrastructure
TYPO3 is continuously developed and while EkspressWeb was built on version 4.5, the current version at the time of the upgrade was 8.7. Work is currently being done on TYPO3 version 10 with an expected LTS release in April 2020. See the TYPO3 roadmap for more information.
As we do with most live websites, we duplicated the original website to a development subdomain and applied the TYPO3 core updates (4.5 to 6.2 to 7.6 to 8.7). In addition to the core updates, many of the extensions were also updated to their latest versions.
Content
TYPO3 is good at separating content from design and so with the exception of some custom content elements for layout, the customer was able to reuse all of their existing content.
Design
The original design templates made navigating and reading the content on mobile devices difficult. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool was helpful in highlighting the major problems with the original design. Most of these were solved with the TYPO3 Bootstrap package extension and customizations of this to maintain the style of the original site with a fresh look.
Before
More views of the old website can be found on the Wayback Machine.
After
Development
The website uses standard TYPO3 extensions for delivering the content and no custom software development was required for this project.
Results
You can view the current Cumhuriyet Anaokulu website at https://www.cumhuriyetanaokulu.org/startseite/
For help on upgrading your TYPO3 website, please contact us.