AlixPartners - Composable Website Case Study

Overview

 “Our goal at AlixPartners was to create an intuitive, accessible, and energy-efficient website with an easy yet highly flexible publishing framework. All built on a futureproof platform. We knew that a MACH architecture was a somewhat new approach to website builds, especially for professional services firms. However, the work with Novicell has delivered a fantastic foundation, with lightning-fast page performance, a huge reduction in the Carbon footprint compared to our previous site and it has delighted our digital team who are learning to love content management again! 

Building out distinct microservices for search, thought leadership, bio management and particularly our centralised Taxonomy service has given us industry-leading functionality and the ability to adapt much more quickly as the firm evolves. We have created a site and underlying infrastructure that isn’t just cutting edge for the sake of it, but one that truly delivers on performance, flexibility and functionality.” 

– Chris Eatherton, Head of Digital, AlixPartners. 

A Strategic Approach, Not Just a Build

 

At Novicell, we don’t simply design websites—we engineer digital platforms with purpose. Each project is shaped by a proprietary framework grounded in strategic thinking, user experience, and performance. While the specifics of our methodology remain confidential, the outcomes speak for themselves. 

For AlixPartners, we applied our approach to transform their website into a dynamic business development tool. The new platform delivers a seamless, intuitive user experience—built around meaningful content, logical structure, and clearly defined user journeys. Every page now functions as an effective entry point, eliminating dead ends and driving users towards clear, actionable next steps. 

The result is a high-performing website optimised for search, accessibility, responsiveness and speed. It showcases the firm’s people as a key differentiator, integrates relevant content at every touchpoint, and supports personal branding across the organisation. 

Technically, the site leverages a modern composable architecture, cloud hosting, and zero-downtime deployments—ensuring it remains scalable, sustainable, and future-proof. 

This isn’t just a website—it’s a strategic asset designed to deliver measurable impact.

The Solution - Content-Centric Composable Architecture 

Taking a composable approach, the technical solution is designed to deliver a highly adaptable and integrated, content-driven website. 

 

Composable architecture 

Composable architecture for website development is like building with Lego bricks instead of pouring concrete. Instead of creating a single, rigid monolithic website, the platform was assembled from smaller, independent components—each designed for a specific function. These modular elements are seamlessly integrated, allowing the site to evolve effortlessly, scale efficiently, and adapt to new requirements without structural limitations. This approach ensured long-term flexibility, enabling continuous innovation while maintaining a cohesive and dynamic user experience. 

To achieve a truly composable architecture, the platform was structured into individual microservices, each designed to handle a distinct and coherent responsibility: Content Management, Bio Management, Insights and Thought Leadership (Passle), Federated Search (Algolia), Unified Taxonomy, Talent Acquisition System (ATS, Greenhouse) and centralised and shared digital assets (DAM, Cloudinary). 

By ensuring that each element focused solemnly on the features required for its specific function, the solution remained decoupled and efficient. 

This modular approach delivered two key advantages. Firstly, it simplified upgrades and maintenance, making system management more agile and cost-effective. Secondly, it introduced the flexibility to swap out components or services as needed without disrupting the integrity of the overall system. As a result, any feature could be replaced or enhanced without causing widespread dependencies or risks. 

Ultimately, this strategy significantly reduced the cost of change and total cost of ownership, extending the platform’s expected lifetime and ensuring long-term adaptability in an evolving digital landscape. 

 

A central content hub 

At the heart of the composable platform architecture lies a central content hub, designed as a unified repository for content and data coming from various source systems. For this project, Enterspeed was chosen as the central content hub, serving as more than just a repository for storing data. Instead of acting as a passive storage solution, Enterspeed functioned as an active component within the architecture, playing a crucial role in optimising content management, transformation, and delivery. 

By aggregating content from multiple source systems, Enterspeed ensured that all data remained consistent, synchronised, and readily accessible across various channels. Whenever updates were made in the original systems, the content hub automatically processed and distributed the latest version, eliminating redundancy and ensuring accuracy across the platform.  

Beyond content storage, Enterspeed’s real-time processing capabilities allowed it to transform, enrich, and cross-pollinate data, preparing content for seamless presentation. This approach enables smooth content composition, providing unmatched flexibility in design and functionality while significantly optimising the performance and sustainability of content delivery, facilitating efficient distribution across multiple channels. 

Beyond aggregation, the content hub was crucial in making content searchable and accessible. By implementing a unified search meta-model and search display model, data from all source systems could be indexed consistently. This enabled a federated search capability, allowing the search engine to easily retrieve and surface content from any source system in any channel. 

 

Search powered by Algolia 

For this project, Algolia was chosen as the central search engine, delivering an advanced, highly responsive search experience tailored to user needs. Known for its exceptional speed and precision, Algolia enabled contextual search, faceting, filtering, and dynamic ranking, ensuring users could effortlessly find the most relevant content. 

The search implementation covered a wide range of functionalities, including: 

 

• Site-wide Search – Ensuring all content is indexed and easily accessible, delivering a seamless search experience across pages, insights, and biographies. 

• Contextual Search – Delivering results contextual to the content of the page. 

• Faceting & Filtering – Allowing users to refine search results with structured filters, improving navigation and discovery. 

• Biography Search – Enabling quick and intuitive lookup of professionals, with results sorted based on role and seniority. 

• Insights Search – Surfacing expert content, articles, and reports tailored to user interests. 

• Job Search – Helping candidates find opportunities through refined, criteria-based searches. 

 

A key enhancement was the integration of Algolia into the CMS, enabling editors to create dynamic, related content carousels featuring bios, insights, or any relevant content from across the platform. This seamless connection allowed content creators to surface and link relevant materials effortlessly, ensuring users remained engaged with meaningful, related content throughout their journey. 

Additionally, Algolia has a web-based management user interface that provides granular control over search behaviour. This interface allows content editors to fine-tune ranking, relevance, and business logic without requiring developer intervention. Editors can also create context-specific boosts, synonyms, and query rewrites, optimising search results to enhance user experience and drive engagement. 

To further optimise search relevance and usability, A central taxonomy service was introduced to manage facets, filters, and tags to further enhance content discoverability. Algolia was structured around the unified taxonomy service, ensuring consistent categorisation across all content types. This provided a standardised framework for metadata tagging, improving search accuracy and enabling better content discoverability. 

Additionally, facets and filters were made fully configurable within the content management system, allowing editors to customise contextual search options tailored to different content types. This level of control enabled: 

 

• Biography Search: Filters based on industry, service, role, and city, ensuring users could quickly find relevant professionals. 

• Job Search: Filters based on department, experience level, and country, allowing candidates to refine opportunities according to their preferences. 

 

By combining unified taxonomy with flexible search configurations, the solution delivered a highly intuitive and structured search experience. This made it easier for users to discover the right content while empowering editors with powerful tools for content curation. 

 

Content Management 

Umbraco was selected as the content management system (CMS) due to its open-source nature and unparalleled flexibility. Unlike proprietary platforms, Umbraco imposes no restrictions on content structure, layout, or custom functionality, making it an ideal choice for a composable architecture that demands adaptability. 

One of Umbraco’s key strengths is its superior editor experience, designed to empower content creators with intuitive tools for managing and structuring content efficiently. Its user-friendly interface allows for seamless content updates, ensuring that teams can work autonomously without dependency on developers for routine changes. 

Additionally, Umbraco’s highly flexible layout system provided the foundation for a modern and agile user interface, enabling the creation of dynamic and engaging digital experiences. With built-in support for custom integrations, it seamlessly connected with third-party tools and services, ensuring a smooth and scalable ecosystem that could evolve alongside business needs. 

Insights are powered by Passle, a specialised thought leadership platform designed for professional services. Passle enables subject matter experts to effortlessly create and publish high-quality, industry-relevant content, ensuring that insights are timely, authoritative, and engaging. 

 

Thought Leadership and Insights 

By integrating Passle into the platform, professionals can easily share expert commentary, analysis, and industry updates, reinforcing their position as thought leaders in their respective fields. The platform streamlines the content creation process, allowing contributors to draft, edit, and publish posts with minimal friction—ensuring a steady flow of valuable insights. 

Thanks to the composable architecture, the platform seamlessly integrates content from Passle with content from the CMS, enabling a truly unified and dynamic user experience. This allows editorial teams to curate and display insights alongside related articles, biographies, and services, ensuring users receive contextually relevant information across multiple content types. 

Additionally, Passle articles are fully searchable through the central content hub, making them easily discoverable via the site's federated search engine. By leveraging structured taxonomy, metadata, and real-time indexing, insights from Passle are surfaced alongside other content types, ensuring a seamless and intuitive search experience. 

By incorporating Passle within this flexible ecosystem, the project delivers a fully integrated thought leadership platform, providing professionals with a powerful publishing tool while offering users a rich, cohesive, and easily accessible repository of expert insights. 

 

Digital Asset Management 

Cloudinary was selected as the central digital asset management (DAM) solution, providing a powerful and efficient way to store, manage, and deliver media assets across the platform. With its advanced automation, AI-driven transformations, and optimised delivery, Cloudinary ensures that images and videos are seamlessly integrated into the digital experience while maintaining the highest quality and performance. 

A key advantage of Cloudinary is its dynamic transformation capabilities, which allow assets to be automatically resized, reformatted, and enhanced based on the context in which they are displayed. Its AI-powered responsive cropping ensures that the most important part of an image or video remains the focal point, preventing key elements from being cut off and maintaining visual integrity across all screen sizes and devices. 

Optimised content delivery further enhances performance, with Cloudinary automatically applying compression, format conversion, and adaptive streaming, reducing load times while preserving media quality. This results in a faster, smoother user experience, improving engagement across the platform. 

The platform’s composable architecture perfectly fits Cloudinary’s flexible and scalable approach, allowing digital assets to be shared effortlessly across multiple platforms and channels. By integrating Cloudinary into the composable architecture, assets can be stored, accessed, and delivered in a unified and efficient way, ensuring consistency and optimising media management across the entire ecosystem. 

 

Blazingly fast site 

When new content enters the central content hub, the platform intelligently determines whether to trigger a static site generation process. To provide greater flexibility, editors can manually trigger a static site generation, ensuring that updates go live exactly when needed. 

By leveraging Astro and Vue.js, the platform combines the speed and security of static sites with the flexibility of dynamic components, creating an optimal balance between performance and interactivity. Astro enables lightning-fast rendering by pre-building pages at compile time, while Vue.js powers interactive elements, ensuring a seamless and engaging user experience. 

The incremental static generation process allows only modified or newly added content to be regenerated, reducing unnecessary processing and ensuring near-instant updates. For major updates or structural changes, a full site generation process is activated, ensuring all content is refreshed while maintaining the benefits of a static architecture. 

This approach significantly improves load times, scalability, reliability, and sustainability as pre-rendered content is served efficiently through the static host while maintaining the rich, interactive experience expected from a modern web platform. By integrating Astro and Vue.js, the platform delivers a future-proof, high-performance website that is both lightweight and dynamic, ensuring optimal user experience across all devices.