First Advantage Web Development

From In-House Developer to Embedded Global Web Lead

My relationship with First Advantage started in early 2018 when I joined the corporate marketing team.

One of my first major initiatives was replatforming the company’s primary marketing website, fadv.com, from Kentico to WordPress. The goal was to give marketing a platform that was easier to manage, faster to develop on, and flexible enough to support a large global organization.

When I returned to running my own business in 2019, First Advantage became a client.

What followed was a six-year consulting relationship in which I remained deeply embedded with the company and effectively served as its web lead.

There was no separate web design or web development team behind the marketing organization. I owned that function.

Leadership brought me business and marketing goals. My job was to determine what needed to happen on the web, plan the approach, and get it done.

One Web Lead. A Global Organization.

Over seven years, I built, rebuilt, migrated, consolidated, and managed more than 15 First Advantage web properties.

The portfolio supported teams and customers across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, with content published in:

• English

• Spanish

• Portuguese

• Chinese

• Japanese

• Korean

My responsibility extended well beyond WordPress development.

I handled website strategy, UX, final web design, development, hosting decisions, development and production environments, deployments, DNS, migrations, backups, security, performance, integrations, troubleshooting, QA, analytics implementation, privacy requirements, content architecture, and ongoing publishing support.

I worked directly with marketing leadership, regional executives, IT, legal, HR, and members of the executive team throughout the relationship.

I also stayed through numerous leadership and organizational changes. That continuity gave me a deep understanding of the company, its products, its teams, its history, and how the different pieces of its global web presence fit together.

Turning a Collection of Websites Into a Web Platform

When I first became involved, First Advantage’s web presence was fragmented.

Different properties had been created at different times using platforms such as Kentico, DotNetNuke, WordPress, and systems maintained by internal IT teams or outside vendors.

There wasn’t one person responsible for bringing all of it together.

Over time, I helped turn that collection of properties into a more cohesive marketing web ecosystem.

Separate regional websites were rebuilt, migrated, consolidated, or brought into a WordPress Multisite environment where it made sense. Shared systems and reusable patterns made the portfolio easier to maintain while still giving regional teams control over localized content.

The primary fadv.com website grew to more than 100 core pages and hundreds of articles and resources, while new content continued to be published every week.

Making a Large Company Move Faster

One of the biggest advantages of the new system was speed.

Marketing no longer had to treat every new web initiative like a standalone software project.

As the platform matured, I built a reusable library of page templates and components for common needs such as:

• Hero sections

• Product and service pages

• Feature grids

• Tabbed content

• Calls to action

• Landing pages

• Forms

• Resource content

• Campaign pages

Once messaging, imagery, and required approvals were ready, a new product or service page could often be assembled from proven components and launched within a day.

Homepage changes could be made within hours when the business needed them.

New regional properties could start from an established Multisite foundation instead of being designed and developed from scratch.

That flexibility mattered inside a large company where marketing priorities, campaigns, products, leadership, and market conditions were constantly changing.

Supporting Three Rebrands Across a Global Portfolio

During my time with First Advantage, the company went through three major brand evolutions.

Each time, my job was to translate the new brand direction into a functioning web system.

Brand guidelines provided the visual foundation, but every header, footer, page layout, component, responsive treatment, and interaction still had to work on the web.

Some global changes could be handled centrally. Others required manually updating hundreds of elements across the website portfolio.

At the same time, regular marketing work couldn’t stop.

The websites still needed to support campaigns, new products, customer resources, regional teams, lead generation, and weekly publishing while the larger brand transition was underway.

Consolidating Websites Across Countries and Acquisitions

First Advantage also grew and changed through mergers and acquisitions.

During my tenure, acquired properties including KnowYourPeople.co.uk and CorporateScreening.com had to be evaluated and eventually folded into the broader First Advantage web ecosystem.

That work involved much more than moving pages.

I handled content migration, URL planning, redirects, SEO preservation, DNS changes, platform decisions, and the technical details required to bring established websites into the First Advantage portfolio without unnecessarily disrupting users or existing search visibility.

Regional consolidation created another challenge.

Separate websites for markets including Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand were eventually brought together into a unified APAC web structure. Similar consolidation occurred elsewhere as First Advantage looked for more efficient ways for lean regional marketing teams to manage their web presence.

That required coordinating multilingual content, domains, DNS, redirects, migrations, regional requirements, and publishing workflows across multiple countries.

Launching First Advantage in Mainland China

Mainland China presented an entirely different set of requirements.

Launching a compliant marketing website there involved country-specific hosting, infrastructure, regulatory, and technical considerations that didn’t exist elsewhere in the global portfolio.

I researched the requirements, worked with outside vendors, helped determine the hosting and implementation approach, coordinated technical setup, managed the web development process, and worked through the requirements necessary to successfully launch and maintain the property.

Localized content created its own challenges.

Translations were completed by outside language specialists, then provided alongside English reference content. I manually built and QA’d pages section by section, matching translated headlines, paragraphs, navigation, and other content to the correct locations throughout the website.

Similar workflows were used across Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and other localized properties.

Giving Regional Teams More Control

The goal wasn’t to make every content change dependent on me.

As the international portfolio matured, I helped regional marketers become more self-sufficient inside the systems I had built.

I trained team members across APAC and Latin America on WordPress publishing and content management, created written documentation, and recorded screen-share walkthroughs for repeatable processes such as publishing news, updating existing content, and creating new pages.

The combination of reusable components, clear publishing processes, and training gave regional teams more freedom to maintain their own content without sacrificing the larger structure of the global platform.

Owning the Infrastructure Behind the Work

A global web portfolio also has plenty of work that nobody sees.

I was responsible for the technical health of the marketing websites throughout the relationship, including hosting, development environments, production deployments, performance, security, backups, integrations, DNS, and troubleshooting.

Major migrations and DNS cutovers were often intentionally performed late at night to minimize disruption.

When something needed to happen outside normal business hours, I handled it.

That ownership was particularly valuable because the same person planning a migration understood the website architecture, the content, the business requirements, the hosting environment, the domains, and the downstream marketing implications.

There wasn’t a chain of vendors handing pieces of the project back and forth.

Seven Years of Growth and Constant Change

The web platform supported hundreds of thousands of visitors, customers, candidates, partners, and prospects across First Advantage’s global markets.

Public SEMrush estimates show monthly traffic to fadv.com growing from roughly 50,000 visits per month to approximately 190,000 per month during my tenure.

I wasn’t First Advantage’s SEO lead, and that growth was the result of work across a much larger marketing organization. My role was making sure the web platform underneath those efforts could support it.

The more meaningful measure of my work was the operational capacity the platform created.

Across those seven years:

• 15+ web properties were built, rebuilt, migrated, consolidated, or managed

• The global portfolio supported 6 languages

• fadv.com grew to 100+ core pages and hundreds of published resources

• New marketing content was being shipped every week

• New pages could often be launched the same day they were approved

• Three company rebrands were implemented across the web portfolio

• Multiple acquired websites were successfully consolidated

• International marketing teams were trained to manage localized content

• Global hosting, security, migrations, integrations, and ongoing development were managed through a single web function

For most of that time, that web function was me.

The Final Transition

My relationship with First Advantage continued through another major change when the company acquired Sterling, one of its largest competitors.

Sterling entered the combined organization with a much larger existing creative and web operation, including dedicated developers, designers, and UX professionals.

During the transition, I documented the First Advantage web portfolio, advised the incoming Creative Director and development team, helped implement updated branding, and continued managing and developing the First Advantage side of the web ecosystem while the newly combined teams worked through the larger integration.

My engagement concluded at the end of June 2025.

By that point, the work I had handled largely on my own for years could transition into a broader internal team with dedicated people across development, design, UX, and creative.

It was a fitting end to a seven-year relationship.

What started as rebuilding one corporate website had grown into responsibility for the web infrastructure behind a global marketing organization.