ABOUT RITTER SPORT

Founded in 1912, the family-owned company has its headquarters in Waldenbuch, Germany, a second production site in Breitenbrunn, Austria, and subsidiaries in other international markets. Today, it employs around 1,750 people and achieved a turnover of 505 million Euros in 2021. 

Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG is the first, and only (up to this point), major chocolate bar manufacturer to source only certified sustainable cocoa for its entire product range, which includes the Ritter Sport and Amicelli brands. This is in line with the company's own claim to do the right thing to make really good chocolate. The colorful Ritter Sport squares are sold in over 100 countries worldwide.

TIME FOR NEW CONTENT STRUCTURES

It's the content that counts. Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG, manufacturer of the famous Ritter Sport square chocolates, knows this best of all. However, digital content is fast-moving these days and wants to be “snacked” on just as much as the sweet squares. The foundation for speed and flexibility is, among other things, independence. Ritter approached Zoi with the desire to break free from agencies and third-party providers and migrate their website to a new system. After a tool evaluation, the joint choice fell on Duda – a flexible page builder and content management system. The goal was to create a new backend that would enable the staff at Ritter to make adjustments to the site themselves and edit ongoing content independently – without webmaster support.

NEW FLEXIBILITY WITHOUT IT KNOWLEDGE

After the tool analysis and a joint evaluation, Zoi prepared the relocation of the then-existing website structure including content with the content management system Duda. Duda offers a set of widgets and modules from which users can create websites using a drag-drop system. Zoi supplemented this basic offering by setting up custom widgets developed for Ritter in order to map complex use cases at Ritter with tailored modules. These include features such as overview pages for the products, filtered content, 3D image viewer, or Show & Hide, in order to display longer content interactively.

After a redesign initiated by the Berlin agency Kreuzbergkind, Zoi developed a style guide-compliant front-end implementation for the new website together with the Marketing managers of Ritter Sport. 

The special feature of the project is that Ritter can manage and edit the website completely in the new container-based Flexbox system from Duda. This results in a significant leap in look, interactivity, and, above all, responsiveness. Another benefit: The contents of the product pages can be flexibly and completely independently maintained and changed in a familiar office environment via Google Sheets.

Zoi currently advises the chocolate manufacturer on the ongoing use of the page builder system, with a focus on UI and UX issues. It has been so successful that employees of Ritter Sport have since been able to create other websites on their own. Empowerment at its best!

With the migration to Duda, Zoi combines the demand for a simple drag-drop system that has been completely customized with individual widgets written in code. In addition, the widgets are adaptable and can thus be used for multiple applications. 

Internationally, our Zoi team in Germany worked with our talented programmers in Vietnam to develop an individual and budget-friendly solution. 

In order for the website to meet current Google standards and achieve the best possible search results, the style guides were also optimized according to SEO guidelines and machine readability.

EXCLUSIVE WIDGETS FOR MAXIMUM FLEXIBILITY

A basic building block of the development of custom code widgets are so-called dynamic collections – the basis for data maintenance via Google Sheets. In this way, content is loaded directly into the website via the widget, without the high manual effort of having to populate the widgets themselves. If changes are made to the data records, e.g. a text on the product page of an article needs to be changed, only the text in the table row is adjusted in the Google Sheet. The collection then updates the content live on the website.

Duda combines independence, speed, and individuality through its functionality.

Within custom code widgets, dynamic collections enable data maintenance via Google Sheets.

We now have complete ownership of all our websites – which is great. Together with Zoi, we were able to adapt the page builder system to our needs and now work independently and flexibly with our content thanks to the custom widgets.