The Lynx Effect

BBH

How do you make a sexy content management system? Design it to let brand content teams publish anything: PHP, .NET, Flash or HTML, all seamlessly integrated.  That’s exactly what Specialmoves designed and built for Lynx/Axe.

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Soft jazz wafts across the room as their eyes meet yet again. He summons up the courage, crosses the bar and offers to buy her a drink. ‘I make content management systems’, he breathes in a low voice, as she gazes back with smoky, half-lidded eyes.

Sound sexy? Not at first. That’s because building Content Management Systems is not usually a sexy business. But it can be just as rewarding and solve as many problems as a slinky masterpiece of user interface design.

We had already built the pan European site for Lynx/Axe in multiple languages. Each territory (of half a dozen) manages their content with a bespoke CMS built using Adobe AIR plugged into a .NET backend. Our backend could support both Flash and standards compliant HTML, to cover off a premium visual experience, SEO and accessibility. BBH - Lynx/Axe’s ad agency - were so happy with our work that they came back a few years later and asked us to do more, with the rather daunting brief of being able to “publish anything”. Something easy then.

What ‘anything’ meant was content that ranged from microsites to custom-landing pages, alongside more standard pieces of content like images and embedded YouTube videos; perhaps even WordPress too, all running within the site. Visit now and you’ll see all of those things fully integrated within the menu structure, the site-wide search functionality and the site design.

This seamless integration hides quite how technically complex this achievement was. Behind the scenes, the site is running on a Microsoft stack, leveraging some of the latest features in IIS7 to enable dynamic server administration as well as the ability to serve PHP pages. What this means to CMS users is that they can use their existing in-house PHP, .NET, Flash or HTML skills to create their content as normal, and we handle all of the integration.

So what next? Well, we’ve created a cutting edge content platform, and we’re intrigued as to the kind of content it’s going to allow the Lynx team to create.  Given the Lynx brand, that’s likely to be sexy as hell.