XTREMEAG.FARM

Building a More Bingeable Member Website

Challenge

Adaptability Built In

The award-winning Growers of XtremeAg were in high demand for events and speaking engagements. But they wanted to expand their reach and share more of their expertise. They realized that an online member community would be ideal, so they turned to Refactored to build a fully functional member platform—from the ground up.

However, almost immediately after that site launch, they realized that they’d chosen the wrong medium for their mobile audience. We helped the Growers make a hard shift, customizing their blog-centric membership site to enable video publishing at scale.

Since that launch, the XtremeAg Growers have proven to be highly capable content publishers, producing thousands of pieces of video content and expanding across media formats including webinars and podcasts as well as live events.

Now, they were set to launch a new TV series, adding yet another media channel. With a site already past it’s limits and an audience whose viewing habits turn on a dime, the XtremeAg team knew they needed another evolution.

They asked Refactored to re-imagine their site, empowering their teams with a more media-forward platform and empowering their users with more efficient navigation, more relevant search and content recommendations, and a better user experience.

The ultimate goal was to not just get more people to engage—but keep them connected to content that would truly help them with their specific farming needs and challenges.

Deliverables

Website

Ecommerce

Content Personalization

Dynamic Site Search

Service Offerings

Strategy

UI and UX Design

Visual Design

Web Development

Systems Integration

SEO

XtremeAg's modern website mobile-first design

Requirements

Getting Viewers On a Roll

For XtremeAg’s Growers and partnering sponsors, member engagement means empowering viewers to consume not just the first video they came for but also the next video…and the next…and the next.

It needs to be bingeable. Like YouTube. Or Spotify.

It needs to be personally relevant, enabling visitors to easily:

Deep-dive into content that matters to them
Understand the bigger benefits of becoming a member
See and connect to partner organizations and products

It needs to be future-proof, to make immediate improvements and position them for ongoing evolution.

Solution

Modern Web Technology, Modern Experience

We recommended moving the member website to Storyblok, our top-pick headless content management system.

When modernizing a website, transitioning from traditional to headless CMS is becoming a higher priority for member-based organizations like XtremeAg.

They needed a solution that would empower them to:

Efficiently manage content to maintain their high-velocity publishing
Emulate the best practices of video media companies
Flexibly enable changes to match new customer behavior
Share content with across multiple channels

XtremeAg's High-Volume Content Production

12+ videos a week
1-2 webinars a month
Special series and programs with partners
Podcast
Live events
TV show

Personalized video recommendations in Storyblok website

Exceptional Content and Site Management

Storyblok’s best-in-class Visual Editor, best practices-configured by the Refactored dev team, dramatically improves the XtremeAg team’s content management experience with:

User-friendly editing tools
Modern hosting approach for increased site speed
Improved access to adjust SEO capabilities

Progressive search for improved member engagement

Seamless Data Integration for Search and Personalization

Storyblok easily enabled us to integrate the Algolia Recommends AI search tool into the site, feeding it live analytics data to inform the machine learning application and enable more meaningful content discovery:

Progressive search auto-populates as the user types.
"What’s Trending" displays across the member community, in real time.
"What’s New" feeds surface content tailored to match the user profile.
Results filtering improves automated and customized recommendations.

XtremeAg users get a modern media experience

Support for Best-of-Breed Tools and Best Practices

Storyblok flexibly accommodates both API integrations and custom feature builds, so our team was able to create an optimized video experience that mimics other, familiar media sites, including:

Prominent video player for selected content
“Up Next” list to prompt continuous watching
Related site links to encourage deep dives

Process

Accelerating Website Modernization

Because we had built XtremeAg’s original site and have remained their hands-on technical partner, Refactored was already in a strong position to remove roadblocks and accelerate the new website.

Web Accelerator and Starter components reduced XtremeAg's website costs

First in Line for the Web Accelerator

XtremeAg’s team was one of the first of our clients to leverage our Web Accelerator—a complete starter site that with 90% of the components needed to build a website faster and maximize available resources. With much of the basic web development already in place, we were able to focus resources on more complex features that personalize, filter, and display their content in unique ways.

Refactored produced over 30 wireframes for cost efficient UX design

Wireframing

Starting with wireframes allowed us to work through potential changes in a cost-effective manner. We produced over 30 wires to document the change before moving to design.

XtremeAg's modern website features intuitive design.

Site UI and UX Design

Once new layouts were approved, we updated the site design to refresh the established brand and enable improved site navigation, quick links, content personalization, flexible headers, and more.

Partner Enhancements

As with other associations, XtremeAg greatly values their partner sponsorships. Our new design improves partner visibility and enhances member access to partner websites, videos, events, and products.

Meticulously Planned Migration

Because the XtremeAg site contains an enormous amount of structured content, it helped that we had already established strong tagging and taxonomy. With that in place, we were able to create a highly intuitive content structure for the site editors. During the content migration, we also pulled video transcripts and created strong metadata across the pages to make the content consumable for both viewers and search engines.

Results

Continuous Evolution

With the launch of their refreshed and modern website—just in time for the premier of their new television show—the XtremeAg Growers are poised for growth.

The new site dramatically improves brand visibility for searchers, content relevance for visitors, and efficiency for XtremeAg’s content management team. But it’s only the beginning of what they envision for their organization.

In upcoming iterations of the site, the XtremeAg team will work with Refactored to add:

A “virtual farmer” AI assistant, trained on their content and leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide accurate, relevant responses to member questions.
A playlist feature to enable site members to create and manage their own video queues, with extended features for paid members.

As their dedicated partner, the Refactored team never stops working for XtremeAg. We’ll always be ready to help them evolve the site as their business and member needs change.