Athene.com Rebuild

After consolidating the public-facing websites at Athene, we embarked on a new effort to update the web portals. The primary business goals were to reduce annual maintenance costs and improve data quality. Secondary goals were to add additional self-service functionality for customers and financial professionals.

Beyond the business objectives, I saw additional opportunities to create efficiency for the writers and designers on the Creative Services team.

• Choosing a content management system that would be simple for for writers to use and allow for content creation without developers.

  • The existing portals were built using IBM Wepshere and Web Content Manager (WCM). IBM’s solution was extremely robust, but had a steep learning curve. All content was maintained in HTML format, which writers did not know.

• Creating a modular design system to increase consistency.

What I did:

• Provide input in the RFP for a new content management system (CMS)

• Help define requirements for the CMS

• Participate in all vendor meetings and demonstrations

• Evaluate and score options

• Define requirements for the design system

• Provide feedback on proposed design concepts

  • Initial concepts were created by Garrigan Lyman Group. They needed more work to meet our detailed functional requirements.

• Provide feedback on UI elements and navigational structure

  • UI work was done by Tiffany Nickelson, who reported to me at the time.

Athene.com was launched in June of 2018. Development on the customer and financial professionals was underway when I left the company.