Smith & Williamson
4,500 pages. 12 weeks. One honest process.
Smith & Williamson (Now S&W Group) was one of the UK's largest accounting and professional services firms, managing the financial affairs of businesses, private clients, and charities across the country. Their digital estate told a different story: two large, unresponsive websites running on a costly legacy CMS, poor information architecture, and duplicate content dragging down SEO. Cogworks migrated 4,500 pages across both sites to Umbraco in 12 weeks, on budget, on time, and built around the people who would use it every day.
Year
2018-2022
Industry
Financial Services
Scope of Work
Technology
The cost of a CMS that isn't working
For a professional services firm of Smith & Williamson's size, content was a commercial asset. Articles, sector expertise, team profiles, service descriptions: these are the things that build credibility with potential clients and give the firm's own people something useful to point to. A CMS that makes publishing slow, difficult, or unreliable does not just create operational frustration. It quietly erodes the firm's ability to communicate.
Smith & Williamson's existing CMS was unresponsive, costly, and structurally compromised. Poor information architecture had allowed duplicate pages to accumulate across both sites over the years, creating real drag on SEO and making the back-office increasingly difficult for content editors to navigate with confidence. The brief was clear: migrate to Umbraco, rebuild the architecture, and do it within a tight timeframe without disrupting the firm's day-to-day operations.
Content editors at the centre, from day one
The most common failure mode in a migration of this scale is treating content editors as an afterthought: building the system first, then handing it over and hoping for the best. We took the opposite approach.
Smith & Williamson's content editors were involved from the very beginning, consulted on how they actually worked, what they needed to find quickly, and what the existing back office made harder than it needed to be. Video demonstrations and tutorials kept the team informed as development progressed, so when the sites went live the editors could publish immediately and with confidence, rather than needing a separate training programme after the fact.
Agile delivery in a firm that had never seen it
The project ran on Cogworks' Agile methodology: quick feedback loops, regular demos, transparent communication, and a structured process for surfacing and resolving issues before they became problems. For a professional services firm accustomed to more traditional project delivery models, the experience was genuinely different.
Quick feedback loops kept both teams aligned throughout. Regular demos gave Smith & Williamson's stakeholders real visibility of progress rather than a reveal at the end. Honest communication meant no surprises. The result was not just two well-built websites delivered on time and within budget, but a way of working that Smith & Williamson found compelling enough to explore adopting in-house. The work was presented jointly at Codegarden - the official Umbraco developer festival - with Graeme Smillie, Smith & Williamson's Head of Creative and Digital.
The foundation of a long relationship
What happened after the migration matters as much as the migration itself. The trust built through that first engagement became the foundation of a relationship that has run for nearly a decade, through multiple brand iterations and significant business change.
When Smith & Williamson merged with Tilney to form Evelyn Partners, Cogworks built the new brand's digital platform. When Evelyn Partners' professional services arm subsequently became independent as S&W Group, Cogworks built that platform, too. Three distinct brands, one consistent thread: a digital partner who understood the business, the audience, and what was at stake at every stage of the journey.
"Working with Cogworks, I can honestly say this has been one of the most enjoyable website projects I have worked on. Constant communication prevented any small challenges taking over the project." Graeme Smillie • Head of Creative and Digital • Smith & Williamson
Got questions? We’ve got answers. Here’s everything you need to know about projects like this one.
What if our priorities or requirements change mid-project?
Our content editors are not particularly technical. How do you ensure they can actually use the system after you hand it over?
We are on a tight timeline. Is it realistic to do a migration of this scale properly in 12 weeks?
We have accumulated years of content across a large site and much of it is duplicated or out of date. How do you approach a migration without just moving the problem to a new platform?
