Carsharing Company take it_ 's and MILES Mobility's journey to a successful migration

Who is take it_

It’s tech, everything is possible. This is the philosophy behind take it_, a design and web development agency from Berlin. They are specialized on Storyblok based websites. Their portfolio consists of simple landing pages and complex corporate websites with integrated headless shops that are connected to your favorite marketing and CRM platforms.
In fact, they are very active in the Storyblok users community, organizing, in collaboration with Storyblok regular developer and marketer meet-ups in Berlin.

What about MILES Mobility?

MILES Mobility is the largest independent car sharing provider in Germany. With a focus on availability, reliability, flexibility, and comfort, their service includes kilometer-based car sharing, van sharing and packages for flexible long-term rentals - without any stations in a free-floating system. The mission is to be part of the personal mobility mix to improve urban life. It’s no surprise that they have an ever-growing user base, being active in eight cities in Germany. As such, they need a website that is easy to manage, GDPR compliant, and user-friendly.

Staying together is progress

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” This famous quote attributed to Henry Ford and Edward Everett Hale, is very representative of take it_’s collaboration with MILES.
Their work together started in early 2021, when the agency was hired for website maintenance and all that it entailed. At the same time, the car sharing company was looking to hire an internal developer to take over these tasks. As they were analyzing their needs, they came to the conclusion that the company could stand to benefit from a CMS change.
Once MILES found their developer, together with the team at take it_, they started the migration to Storyblok.

Objectives and milestones

Previous to migrating the website to Storyblok, MILES’s website was built on Contentful. While it satisfied their needs at the time, the fact that their servers are based in the US became a problem for MILES. As a data processor, the company was not GDPR compliant. Any cloud services hosted in the US are incapable of complying with the GDPR and EU privacy laws. This means that any business operating a website in the EU or with traffic coming from EU visitors, needs to know what data it’s capturing and where this data is being stored.

Secondly, based on their previous experience with Storyblok, take it_ recommended it with the promise of a great improvement in terms of editing experience, content management and internationalization.
After the initial discussion, the first step was to analyze the code base and make decisions regarding what can be migrated, changed or completely rewritten. Mapping these decisions helped them in organizing the timeline and being ready for the go-live in 4 weeks.

The migration wasn’t just limited to Storyblok, the agency also made the decision to make the change from Gatsby to Next and to TypeScript.
After the go-live, the first improvements were quickly noticed. With Contentful and Gatsby, even with a staging server, changes took a while to be visible and impacted the productivity. Migrating to Next.js solved all that. Additionally, the Visual Editor of Storyblok, completely changed the editing process for the better.

The road forward

MILES and take it_ continue their collaboration with regular calls between the developers. Together they look for solutions and are implementing new features. On their list is integrating a new Image API into the website to improve page performance.