Blue Nose

From legacy to headless with Sanity, Next.js, and Netlify

Blue Nose about working with Ikius:

Antti Valtola

Blue Nose cruises

My company’s website was in need of renewal in late 2020. I received offers from multiple companies but in the end I ended up making an agreement with Ikius.

Summary

Client: Blue Nose

Visit their site

Turku-based Blue Nose is a cruise company that takes passengers all around the Turku archipelago and the surrounding islands.

Scope and challenges
- Migrated Blue Nose's legacy site to a modern tech stack (Sanity, Next.js, and Netlify)
- Improved content management and site performance.
- Built an user-friendly, converting landing page
Solutions and results
- Implemented a modernized, multi-user headless content management with Sanity CMS
- Built a next-gen frontend using Next.js
- 20% increased conversion rates
- Got 3x faster page load times compared to the previous website

We developed a marketing website for a cruise line

Together with Blue Nose, we built an optimized Next.js website with carefully crafted user journeys from page landing to cruise reservation. Simple but effective.

Migration to headless architecture with Sanity, Next.js, and Netlify

We built a new marketing website to optimize reserving cruises and increase brand awareness. The site is built with Next.js and hosted on Netlify. Before moving to Jamstack, Blue Nose's site was hosted on a legacy CMS that was being deprecated and didn't even support mobile browsers! After migrating to Next.js Blue Nose's site is optimized and ready to sail to the next-gen waters.

We created a next-gen
for a Finnish cruise line

Modern
technology stack
Blue Nose went from a legacy technology stack with a CMS that didn't support mobile devices to a modern stack using headless technology, cutting-edge frontend frameworks and a CDN and deployment platform that serves blazing-fast content.
Optimized
for Google Page Experience and Core Web Vitals
The site has been optimized for Google Core Web Vitals (LCP, DIF, CLS) when not loading third party scripts
Reliable
Content operations
Before migrating to Jamstack, Blue Nose's site was running on a poorly configured legacy CMS. Each time content was updated, there was a risk something would break. With Sanity CMS the site is more reliable than before and content managers can update the site without the fear of breaking it.
Converting
landing pages
Thanks to Sanity CMS and Next.js, blazing-fast speeds and ease of use, Blue Nose's landing pages convert better, which results in more people visiting the website and booking cruise trips.

Next-generation tech stack
for a marketing website

Orchestrating a migration project from a legacy CMS to a headless tech stack requires careful planning and execution. Here's how we did it:

1. Model content in Sanity
The first step in the migration process was to model content in Sanity based on the previous site structure. We did this by going through all the pages and recreating them as modular content models in Sanity.
2. Content migration
After modeling the content on Sanity CMS, the second step was to export all data such as pages, images, and other assets from their legacy platform and import them to Sanity. Thanks to Sanity's flexibility, it was easy to get the old content, transform it to match the new content models, and import it into the new headless CMS.
3. Frontend development
Now that all data was modeled and migrated to Sanity, it was convenient to start working on the frontend software code with Next.js. The cool thing about the Next.js + Sanity combination is that it provides an excellent architecture for creating modular, highly customizable, efficient page layouts.
4. QA and publication
The final step involved extensive quality assurance, ensuring all pages contained correct data from SEO tags to H tag ordering. After extensive QA, the site was published on Netlify.