Paving the digital way to European leadership
itsme® is the market leader in Belgium for digital identification, and its ambitions reach well beyond Belgium's borders. To prepare for that European growth, itsme® asked Craftzing to run an impact analysis of how its expansion plans would affect every digital touchpoint used by consumers, partners and internal teams. That analysis surfaced two priorities: aligning itsme®'s marketing website with the growth strategy, and building a self-service business portal for partners. This story zooms in on the marketing website; you can read about the parallel work on the business portal in the other case study.
Where the business portal is the operational engine that gets partners integrated, the marketing website is itsme®'s public front door, the place where consumers and prospects first meet the brand. Getting that front door right for a European audience turned out to be a two-phase journey.
The challenge: walk the talk: create a stress-free digital front door
Improving digital inclusion and digital fluency has been one of itsme®'s focal points since 2019, reinforced by its membership of DigitAll, a Belgian coalition working toward a more inclusive digital society. As part of that commitment, itsme® took a hard look at its own website and found that creating an account wasn't straightforward for everyone, leaving some users with a form of “digital stress”.
At the same time, the impact analysis the Craftzing business strategists were asked to conduct before building anything, had made clear that the site needed to be ready to expand into new European markets in multiple languages, without losing the SEO position itsme® had already built across more than 250 existing pages.
Once the first version of the new website was up and running, a second phase kicked off in which we brought all of that website content into the itsme® app in the fastest, simplest way possible.
The solution: accessible, multi-market digital touchpoints
The result of revamping the itsme®’s content website (and app) is a digital environment built 'inclusive by design', developed against the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard at every stage of UX, design and front-end work, and favouring EU-based marketing technology such as TagCommander and AT Internet over traditional US-based tools wherever possible.
A custom-built page builder with more than 120 components now lets itsme®'s marketing team create new pages on their own, and the flexible, multi-country, multi-language CMS architecture proved its worth almost immediately: when itsme® expanded into the Netherlands, the content team was able to duplicate and adapt the necessary pages in both English and Dutch and get the Dutch site live quickly.
The second phase then extended that same foundation into the itsme® app, giving the content team a single source of truth to keep partner content up to date across both the website and the app, and doing so faster and more cost-effectively than the alternative of the app team building a separate API endpoint themselves.
The approach: two phases, one flexible foundation
With itsme®'s growth plans in mind, Craftzing chose a headless CMS architecture from the outset. DatoCMS gave the content team a user-friendly, EU-based platform with the capacity to manage 250-plus pages and easily translate content as itsme® entered new markets, while Next.js provided the production-ready React foundation for how those pages get rendered.
Everything was built component-based, so every section is a reusable building block that the content team can recombine to compose new pages, an approach that paid off directly when the Dutch expansion needed to move fast.
That same foundation made the second phase far simpler than it might otherwise have been. When itsme® wanted its app to draw on the same partner content as the website, Craftzing's development team worked closely with itsme®'s solution and technical architects, UX/UI designer and app team to design an architecture that was both well thought through and secure.
The team expanded the existing DatoCMS data structure with new content blocks built for the app, such as lists and article carousels, then built a new API endpoint on top of the website's existing technical architecture. That endpoint retrieves partner content from DatoCMS and translates it directly into a format the itsme® app can use, so the app team only had to integrate the API rather than design a separate content system of their own.
Everything is component-based, meaning all sections consist of reusable components. This approach provides significant advantages in terms of scalability, especially when designing new sections.
