Maxon developed a cutting-edge website with Foster Commerce

Since its founding in 1986, Maxon has grown to be a leader in the 3D motion software industry. To manage its many ongoing acquisitions the company requires a fast and flexible website to stay one step ahead of competitors and showcase its state-of-the-art products.

Today, Maxon’s multilingual, headless website is operating at peak performance. The website hosts an average of over 900,000 monthly users and successfully enables the marketing team to seamlessly launch a campaign every month.

Early on, Maxon Chief Marketing Officer, Paul Babb, had a vision to cultivate an online community of creators around Maxon products.

Paul asked creators to try Maxon software and gathered their feedback to make improvements. He provided creators with an online space where they could share their work and learn from each other.

Paul’s idea sparked a wave of development for new 3D design, motion graphics, and visual effects products. The community of creators that grew alongside Maxon was the engine behind its powerful rise from being one of over 35 possible 3D software products to one of the five that dominate the market today.

Yet as the company hosted more and more content and acquired new software, several growth-related challenges for its website emerged. Paul needed a dependable and smart tech partner who could help him continue to fulfill his vision and Maxon’s mission to become an innovative leader in imaging software.

Paul, along with his team of marketers and designers, wanted the freedom to run swiftly moving product launches and campaigns without constant web developer input.

They wanted to ensure that they could easily add new product-related content without disrupting the site’s architecture while optimizing for the user experience.

Paul and site admins wanted a simple and intuitive experience. They wanted to reduce repetitive work and entries, for example; the number of times marketers had to enter product descriptions.

To meet the global demand for its software, Paul’s team needed to translate content into nine different languages. They also required that the website handle customer transactions in 15 different currencies.

Additionally, Paul and his team needed to host image and video-heavy content without fear of slowing the site down. The site had to remain user-friendly for customers and be as frictionless as possible.

After Maxon’s CMO, Paul Babb, had a successful collaboration with Foster Commerce for Maxon’s legacy site, Cineversity.com, he invited the Foster Commerce team to bring their tech know-how to Maxon.net.

Foster Commerce responded by being an active tech partner with a voice at the table, suggesting creative ways to solve problems and make things happen.

By taking time to understand Paul’s vision for the website, Foster Commerce has kept pace with Maxon’s growth, even staying ahead of expectations to give Maxon customers the innovative experiences they’ve come to expect. Paul says,

To effectively manage the demands of fast-moving campaigns Foster Commerce built the website using Craft CMS and Nuxt.

Craft CMS is an open-source flexible platform designed to support ease of content management and the authoring experience, including page translation.

Nuxt is a developer framework that is also open-source. It empowers teams to develop headless websites that have both static and dynamically rendered pages, making them incredibly fast.

Once this infrastructure was in place, Foster Commerce developers were able to turn their focus towards streamlining the content marketing experience.

They started by translating what Paul needed into detailed plans that allowed them to create a back end that is simple and self-explanatory for his team to use.

For example, authors enjoy composable content components inside of page builders that keep the design locked in yet allow plenty of creative options for content creators, too.

Foster Commerce also designed what Paul calls a “dream tool” for his content marketers. This solution gives Paul’s team the ability to preview several pages of draft campaign content at once and share it with stakeholders via one link in the context of the live site.

Once drafts are approved marketers can publish all of the drafts simultaneously, using one button.

To help marketers add new products without the need for developers each time, the Foster Commerce team developed and implemented a content strategy to support ease of use by admins.

Because of its clear content design, marketing teams are able to add content to the CMS and easily retain the integrity of the site architecture.

In addition, Foster Commerce designed a streamlined system of product management. Their design makes it simple for content marketers to add products and update product descriptions without the need for duplicate content entries.

Customers can navigate intuitively through the website on any device to find what they need and easily discover new software products, too.

To solve the problem of displaying currencies based on a user’s location, Foster Commerce developers integrated the website with Digital River.

Digital River is a global ecommerce engine and payment gateway handling all customer transactions.

Foster Commerce engineers developed the website to set a customer’s default currency using geolocation data from Cloudflare. Then, based on the default currency, the correct product information is pulled from Digital River, ensuring that users are shown the right price for a product and with correctly calculated tax based on one of the 15 local currencies in use by Maxon customers.

To make this experience as user-friendly as possible, the Foster Commerce team also created the ability for customers to override the geolocation should they need to.

The Foster Commerce team developed an additional headless integration with 10Duke, Maxon’s identity provider and customer licenses database. 10Duke enables certain user permissions based on purchase history.

The headless integration allows users to sign in to the site and download permission-based files without experiencing page rendering delays or speed bumps.

Paul attributes much of the success of the website to the creative collaboration with Foster Commerce CEO Stephen Callender and engineers, saying,

For Foster Commerce developers this approach is a matter of course. They routinely seek to empower client teams with thoughtful solutions.

For example, due to this approach, the translators on Paul’s team don’t have to know code. They can simply go into the site and do their job without having to routinely call on Foster Commerce engineers for help.

Paul also appreciated that Foster Commerce makes their system of project management easy to understand, saying,

Today Maxon has a site that Paul says is “monumental” in its scope, built efficiently and with purpose serving customers in nine different languages and 15 currencies.

The Maxon team has full control over their launches and marketing so new campaigns and acquisitions can go on without a blip. They enjoy the authoring experience because of how it’s modeled in Craft CMS.

Maxon can keep updating content on the site to keep it dynamic and exciting, and without the need for additional programming.

Because the site is built so that Paul’s team has full control, Paul can put the Foster Commerce team to work building core pieces of code that give Maxon critical new functionality or features for its website.

And with a website built on Craft CMS using Nuxt, Paul is fulfilling his vision — and Maxon its mission — to stay on the cutting edge of development.

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