ViaStrada is a New Zealand team of dedicated transport planners and engineers, advising on everything from local intersection design through to nationally applicable transport research. Their website is a significant front door for the business - showcasing projects, services, publications and the team - so it needs to work well on every device a client, council officer or prospective hire might pick up.
ViaStrada first approached BlueFusion for a full redesign, but our designer was booked out at the time and they went elsewhere. About six months later they came back: the site they'd ended up with had menus rendering off the edge of the page, text that was unreadable on mobile, and a layout that behaved unpredictably across screen sizes. The business was losing confidence in the site, and a full redesign was still several months out.
Rather than ask them to wait, we proposed a front-end rescue. The existing Drupal site structure, content model and data were largely fine — the problem was the theme. We kept the content layer in place and rebuilt the presentation layer from the ground up as a modern, component-based Drupal 11 theme using Single Directory Components (SDC), TailwindCSS and AlpineJS. Because the rebuild sat on top of the existing content, there was no migration, no content freeze and no re-entry of pages - a significant saving in time, cost and risk.
We worked closely with ViaStrada's Marketing Manager Debbie Roxby through the build, presenting early layout options for approval and iterating section by section. Components turned out to be a real win here: changing the card layout on the services page, or the header behaviour on project pages, didn't ripple out and break anything else. On desktop, a Drupal MegaMenu surfaces the full service taxonomy in a single glance; on mobile, the same information collapses into a clean drill-down pattern. Facets drive filtering on the projects listing so visitors can narrow by service area.
Alongside the theme work we moved the site to more modern, lower-cost hosting, set ViaStrada up with Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager, and built them automated monthly Data Studio reports so they can see traffic and engagement without effort.
A few months after launch, the explosion in AI scraping traffic started to put load on the site and surface duplicate-content URLs. We put Cloudflare in front of the site, blocked AI scrapers from hitting the URL variants that presented the same content multiple ways, and the site has been humming along at full speed worldwide since.
Halfway through a struggling website refresh, we reached out to Andy at BlueFusion for help. He quickly understood our needs, worked within our budget, and provided a clear path to completion.
With excellent communication and a solution-focused mindset, Andy’s friendly and straightforward approach made working with him and BlueFusion a great experience.
-- Debbie Roxby, Marketing Manager, ViaStrada
