A flexible open source CMS focused on security and scalability, great for building complex websites, applications, and back-end portals.
My Italian Family
Growing a Small Italian-American Business into a Digital Research Empire
2013
2019
Technologies
- Learn more about Drupal
- Learn more about Drupal Commerce
An open source e-commerce framework, built for Drupal, used to build flexible websites and applications.
Background
Founded in 2000, My Italian Family specializes in connecting people who have Italian heritage to their roots back in Italy. The company offers family research and dual citizenship services. They also assist families looking to request documents from the Italian government.
Approximately 25 million Italians have migrated from their homelands since 1880. This amazing figure provides a large opportunity to reconnect customers to their Italian ancestors, living relatives, and much more. Since founding My Italian Family, founder Bianca Ottone and her staff have helped thousands of families learn more about their heritage.
With its staff dedicated to providing research and an excellent customer service, My Italian Family needed a technical team to help them migrate from a messy Miva installation to a more flexible content management system (CMS) with ecommerce functionality.
We are pleased to say Tragic Media has been their trusted technical partner for 6 years and counting!
Challenge
My Italian Family offers a high-touch, highly-personal service. The client journey is long – from having site visitors understand the services available to being able to educate themselves on which offering suits their needs.
Depending on the offering, a considerable amount of research and paperwork must be completed by the My Italian Family staff to provide the service. Thus, educating a customer about the details, requirements, and timeline for the service they are purchasing is not as easy as with other online services.
One of our largest challenges has been helping My Italian Family better package and position the each service. A second challenge is that Bianca is a small business owner, so she has to balance growing the My Italian Family website with the resources available.
Result
Tragic Media has been able to help My Italian Family build and scale their nuanced service offering.
Specifically, we:
Transitioned from an "out-the-box" platform that was bursting at the seams to a customized Drupal content management system.
Migrated from a low-performance, high-cost hosting provider to Google Cloud – which significantly lowered their monthly bill while also increasing their performance!
Redefined the content architecture and purchase process on the site (first when migrating from Miva, and more recently in a massive overhaul) to increase conversions, drive sales, and support new service offerings.
Transition from Miva to Drupal
In 2013, our first project with My Italian Family was to transition them from a Miva ecommerce store to a customized Drupal 7 + Drupal Commerce installation. There is a time and place for ecommerce platforms such as Miva, Shopify, and Squarespace Commerce – but it was clear that a traditional store platform was not right for My Italian Family.
Bianca and her team needed robust content management capabilities, which are difficult to find in traditional ecommerce products. Leveraging Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS), and Drupal Commerce, a free ecommerce module for Drupal, we were able to create a robust foundation for My Italian Family.
In addition, we have iteratively evolved their website's design and functionality. We started with Drupal 7 years ago and, in our recent overhaul, found no reason to replace this platform!
Migration to Google Cloud
Tragic Media also migrated all My Italian Family web properties from their legacy hosting provider to Google Cloud, one of the three largest public clouds in the world. Google Cloud offers world-class speed, availability, and reliability. And the results speak for themselves.
My Italian Family was able to go from spending $250/month down to $30/month, an 88% price reduction! This one change alones nets the company more than $2,500 each year.
In addition, this move to Good Cloud has increased the site’s performance, made new updates easier to deploy, and relieved client frustrations. We have not experienced any downtime since migrating to Google Cloud!
Content and Product Strategy
Throughout 2018, we worked with My Italian Family to iteratively re-architecture their entire website to better align with their changing business model.
When the company first started, ancestry.com did not exist. Given the rise of competitors and client requests for new services, Bianca has been able to adapt her services to suit this ever-changing market.
As a result, the Tragic Media team reorganized the architecture of the entire site content. We put a focus on the company’s services, and evolved their small blog into a robust resource center to provide the wealth of Italian genealogy and citizenship information to site visitors.
We also leveraged modern ecommerce best practices to provide a better way for users to find, understand, and purchase product(s) on the site.
Custom Drupal Commerce Features
The Tragic Media team has added custom functionality to Drupal, including:
+ Adding product pricing rules and conditional logic
+ Introducing complicated form requirements
+ Allowing for custom quotes for non-standard product offerings
In 2018, we flexed our Drupal Commerce muscles and built an entirely new product funnel. This funnel, built using Ajax, is manageable from the admin dashboard and provides the ability for My Italian Family to build out unique product pages.
These unique pages allow users to purchase one product, or multiple products, at a time. Once products are added to a user's cart, we even provide sophisticated recommendations for related product offerings.
Responsive Website Theme
n 2017, we updated the existing My Italian Family website to be responsive. This new, responsive website provided a better experience for the growing mobile and tablet traffic. It also provided a boost in mobile search results.
The next year, we went through a more thorough redesign process to modernize the website. We created completely new interfaces and reworked the landing pages, product pages, product configuration flows, and resource center.
In 2019, we will upgrade the rest of the site – starting with the home page. This is another example of how we can build the right foundation from day one, but segment projects to fit a client's time and budget constraints.
Organizable Resource Center
My Italian Family had a small blog. But we wanted to build a full resource center that could guide potential customers, new customers, and returning customers alike. And, unlike a blog, resources stay relevant no matter when they were published.
Site visitors can navigate to the My Italian Family Resource Center to better understand the complicated topics surrounding Italian research, dual citizenship, discounts, travel, and more.
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Re-creating a website from Start to Finish can be quite challenging; you need a company who understands your business model and can help you identify which areas (i.e. pages) are key to attract more people and eventually turn them into paying customers. Tragic Media did just that and for the last five years we have been working together to expand our business with more services. A website is not just a store with a shopping cart, it is your main window to attract your customers. Thanks to Rich and his amazing team we have been able to triple our revenue, really exciting!
Bianca Ottone | Founder and Managing Director
Configurable
Product Administration
Working hand-in-hand with My Italian Family, we built completely configurable product administration capabilities. As a result, the My Italian Family team can create multiple product customization flows with ease. These flows allow users to more easily compare, bundle, and purchase services on the website. Site administrators can also configure upsell products, like telephone consultations, depending upon what the user has added to their cart.
This is just one example of the capabilities that are available to businesses when they look beyond "out-of-the-box" ecommerce solutions.
Ongoing
Growth Support
Tragic Media understands how modern software is developed. Instead of relying on a "major overhaul" every few years, Tragic Media works alongside our clients to continually provide improvements based on goals and available budget.
Our iterative approach allows for quicker implementation and more ability to pivot and adapt to changing markets. This approach allows us to stay close to the client and their customers, so we are continually improving and optimizing the user experience.
Conclusion
Tragic Media and worked closely with the My Italian Family team to understand their product offerings, customers, and current technology. With this knowledge, we have embarked on a number of projects together over the past 6 years.
We have been Bianca’s digital partner and led the transformation from Miva to a custom Drupal installation, the migration to Google Cloud, the launch of a mobile-responsive website, and much more.
Since our initial engagement with My Italian Family, their business has grown over 3x larger!
