Kentico Top 10 Websites for June 2017

Toronto Global, the region’s international investment attraction agency, assists foreign companies relocate and expand operations, access markets, attract talent, and tap into business resources within the most diverse economy in North America. Key outcomes for this project included delivery of a visually compelling website utilizing experiential imagery and integrated interactive data visualization. In addition the Toronto Global board members required a secure area to share meeting material, financial documents, marketing material and committee specific documents. Custom Page Types and Repeater Web Parts were used to acquire board documents and display them to those with the appropriate permissions. In order to ensure an optimum user experience while improving the website’s overall SEO, the following performance optimization tasks were performed; output caching, configuring file storage and processing on the server’s file system, optimizing data source components, disabling output filters, and enabling code minification and compression to reduce the size of CSS and JavaScript resources.

Marc’s is a successful discount drugstore and grocery chain, with stores in Northern and Central Ohio. The company was looking to refresh its current website, with three priorities in mind: one, create an engaging, contemporary, and responsive design; two, improve the website’s structure for users to quickly and easily navigate the site, both now and as future content needs arise; and three, effortlessly integrate with PayPal and other third-party solutions, including their E-Shop, weekly circular, and store locator. Marc’s engaged Hileman Group to develop a solution that successfully met all three goals. Hileman Group was able to deliver a bold, modern look and feel, as well as a clear, navigable framework, effectively incorporating sophisticated functionality for a truly seamless and consistent user experience. Since its launch, the newly designed website has received several accolades, both from the client and from current users.

Van Dessel is one of the top five insurance brokers in Belgium and their website needed to reflect this. They wanted to increase the conversion rate of visitors, providing them with the information they needed and desired from the website (using specific search indexes per target group), and automate their services including a fully online process from A to Z for insuring specific products (e.g., Hearing Implants and Speech processors). The Van Dessel team use Kentico out-of-the-box Blog and Newsletter modules for content marketing, connections to social media, and marketing automation and this helps in streamlining their online processes via workflows. The challenges for this project were mainly situated in the intake process within the different workgroups, which made the project follow-up challenging, together with the complexity of the different multi-step form validations and third-party integrations with Portima and BRIO.

Covering staffing and recruiting, consulting, payroll and taxes, and more, LandrumHR work with more than 1800 small and medium businesses in 44 states. Their previous website, based on Umbraco, had multiple responsive design issues coupled with SEO problems. Also, their blog, hosted on WordPress, had content entry and control issues for blog authors. It was time to change, and a shift to Kentico allowed the LandrumHR marketing team to have full access to manage their content and build marketing campaigns. They are now able to use the custom-built landing page templates and new blog to build out their content and reach their business goals. Kentico custom Web Parts handle options for special calls to action, titles, video options, and testimonials per-page while allowing standard WYSIWYG content entry with custom styles applied. This Kentico implementation has resulted in a 16% increase in website visits, a 42% increase in page views, a 31% increase in session duration, and a 35% decrease in overall bounce rate.

The Gemiva-SVG Group is a social services association supporting people with a handicap, chronic illness, or other limitation and helps them to develop themselves at their own pace. The main goals of the website were to improve the connectivity and cooperation between different locations, to create a seamless user experience between the website and the intranet, as well as to significantly improve functionalities of the website and its user-friendliness. Gemiva employees can log in and be presented with an extended menu structure. They can use functionalities such as a “My Colleagues” button or use an option of public announcements. The challenges were overcome by providing the target groups with big visual content blocks and a read speaker functionality. Additionally, an extended link with the active directory has been custom built. As a result, Gemiva employees gain access automatically to the correct intranet functionalities and do not need a new password.

Moss Adams is a fully integrated professional services firm dedicated to assisting clients with growing, managing, and protecting prosperity. With more than 2,600 professionals and staff across more than 20 locations, they work with many of the world’s most innovative companies and leaders. Kentico powered the previous Moss Adams website, implemented in 2011, and Moss Adams chose the platform again based on years of working with the proactive, solutions-oriented Kentico Consulting Team. In alignment with the firm’s strategic goals, the website now provides articles, events, and other insights to their clients on any device. Updating the website is easier than ever before with the use of Widgets and custom Web Part Containers. Hosting is based on Azure App Service and an Azure Virtual Machine running SQL Server 2016. Before the launch, the team tested the new website using LoadImpact.com. Most pages served up to 500 simultaneous users with the page loading in less than 1.5 seconds.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) is the association representing companies that insure homes, cars, and businesses. It offers customers a variety of services to help them stay informed and provides assistance with the purchase of insurance. Apart from the visual identity enhancement, one of the main goals of the website redesign was search engine optimization. By flattening the content architecture, the IBC team did a good job of eliminating duplicate content, an element that probably penalized SEO performance in the site’s previous version. In addition to being responsive and suitable for the IBC-GAA environment, the new website also facilitates the integration and delivery of content across different social media platforms. MultipleMedia took Kentico’s search capabilities further, by integrating an advanced search engine. Based on the open source extension of ElasticSearch, this advanced search engine brings functionalities like multilingual search, display of real-time results, and integration of search filters.

KordaMentha is a premium boutique advisory firm that provides specialist consulting, forensic, real estate, turnaround, restructuring, and investment management services. The firm is well known for its administration and restructuring work on former Australian airline Ansett, and as such, has built up a very strong reputation in the area of corporate insolvency. However, KordaMentha wanted to reposition itself to raise awareness of its broader services, as well as its footprint across Asia. In line with this brand repositioning, the firm felt it was time to overhaul its website. The overarching objective for the new site was to support and magnify the brand’s revised values and activities while incorporating modern design and usability principles. Among the key outcomes of the new site have been significant time savings for KordaMentha’s content editors and far less reliance on developer assistance.

For a business based within the education sector, the new public website of British Boarding Schools Network markets services to potential clients, whilst the secure MRM (member relationship management) application allows its 2000 private members to share profiles, news, articles, events and other information, conduct detailed searches, message one another, create member groups, and gather intelligence about how their company information is being accessed by other members. Kentico's user-generated content and forum functionality provided a good base for some of the application's required functionality, but the migration to MVC allowed the development of a bespoke framework to turn Kentico into an MRM system. This was then extended even further to allow authenticated users to log in (using Kentico's user module), update this company's profile, send messages, post to a feed, add users to groups, and search for companies.

FESPA is a global federation of 37 national associations for the screen printing, digital printing, and textile printing community. Their website is a hub for industry news and events and it’s a platform for association members to communicate via forums. They chose Kentico for its membership functionality, Forums, E-commerce, and support of multilingual versions. A membership purchase process is based on a custom three step registration and purchase experience, where the user is presented with a very simple interface. Kentico’s built in geo-location functionality permits paid membership in certain counties only. The Pull Agency also created a new module called Global Redirects that allows the bulk management of page redirects. After Kentico implementation, page load speeds reduced by 45%, more than 100 news articles added to the site, and new visitors increased by 10%.

The challenges of the wide range of possible journeys a customer may take with Twinings were overcome by creating personas to help make the user journey as effortless as possible. Personalised content and targeted emails make the journey even easier and this, in turn, encourages return visits, increasing loyalty and sales. The website is integrated with ERP and delivery systems SAP, MetaPack, and Sagepay to communicate in real time for a seamless flow of data to enhance operational efficiency. The result is a website that serves as a Content Management, E-commerce and Marketing platform. The website has seen a 12% increase in e-commerce conversion rate, a 14% increase in transactions, four percent increase in average order value, and was awarded the Wirehive E-commerce Site of the Year and contributed to Ridgeway’s e-commerce victory at the RAR Digital Awards.

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