DoubleShot Creative

DoubleShot Creative is a Bay Area creative and digital marketing agency that won the redesign of CSAA Insurance Group's corporate website and needed the one thing they don't keep in house, a WordPress VIP engineer, and I was that engineer: building the whole site from their Figma designs, shaping the platform architecture with CSAA's IT organization, and migrating twenty-four years of Adobe Experience Manager content into it.

Key Takeaways

  • Delivered a complete WordPress VIP build for a regulated insurer as the sole engineer behind a boutique agency.
  • Shaped the deployment architecture with CSAA's IT organization so VIP's automated code analysis gated every change, while satisfying the client's own source-control requirements.
  • Built a 23-layout module system from Figma, precise enough that bespoke page designs assembled cleanly from reusable parts.
  • Migrated twenty-four years of AEM content, hundreds of insurance tips and press releases with imagery intact, into WordPress.
  • Delivered three enterprise integrations: the Direct Repair Network shop finder, a ZIP-code service-area system, and a CCPA privacy request form integrated with CSAA's API platform.
  • Raised measured accessibility conformance on a site the client's own accessibility team audits quarterly.

Organization

DoubleShot Creative is a WBENC-certified creative and digital marketing agency in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on a partner model. The end client, CSAA Insurance Group, is a AAA insurer; csaa-insurance.aaa.com is its corporate website, the public face of a regulated company: product pages, leadership and governance, newsroom, insurance tips, a repair-network locator and the California privacy request form.

Challenge

The project's technical requirements, WordPress VIP, an AEM migration, three API integrations and insurer-grade security review, sat entirely outside the agency's in-house capability, and the platform decisions had to be negotiated directly with the insurer's IT, accessibility, WAF and API teams.

Solution

  • WP VIP platform architecture done first: repository strategy, the VIP skeleton structure, and a review pipeline where the platform's code analysis gates every pull request.
  • A custom theme built as a module system, 23 flexible-content layouts, with page templates for the newsroom, insurance tips, resource hub, search and the full legal set.
  • Idempotent migration tooling that brought the AEM archive across with categories, dates and full-resolution imagery, then was retired from the codebase once content ownership passed to editors.
  • A WordPress-native geo experience: a ZIP-to-coordinate lookup built from public data, proximity calculation, club-code validation against the AAA footprint, and an admin UI so CSAA maintains it without a developer.
  • The CCPA request form rebuilt with server-side validation and a direct OAuth integration to CSAA's API platform.
  • A pre-launch tracking audit that replaced legacy hardcoded vendor scripts with a clean, valid Tag Manager container.

Results

  • Accessibility conformance up from 45 of 55 to 49 of 55 criteria, a11y score from 96.3 to 99.4, total issues from 155 to 51.
  • 90 to 100% of organic visibility preserved through the replatform via a complete redirect map.
  • Page load time down roughly 40% against the AEM site.
  • Editor self-sufficiency on new pages up roughly 70%, returning 10 to 15 hours a month of content operations.