Kentico Site of the Year 2017 - Special Jury Awards Finalists Unveiled!

Kramp is an international wholesaler, specializing in agriculture, forest and grass care, construction machinery and OEM. It is growing fast, with a continuous demand for new colleagues. Kentico Cloud makes it possible to show vacancies that are relevant to the user as the website checks to what language the user’s browser is set and checks the user’s location. Subsequently, the search results will show content in the user’s language and will only show vacancies that are near the user’s location. Apart from this, the project is also integrated with Kramp’s HR system Workday, because it was necessary that all changes to vacancies in Workday be automatically updated on the website as well. Content is created and managed in Kentico Cloud, from which it can be spread to a range of platforms and interfaces.

The fantasy of worldwide-known author Neil Gaiman and his novel, American Gods, is imprinted in this television series. Its creators, Fremantle Media, were looking for a unique and entertaining way for fans to stay informed about American Gods. They needed an easy-to-use CMS that was adaptable to frequent major structural changes as the content was on a timed release for each new character reveal and episode airing. With Kentico Cloud, all mysteries were kept in the story itself. The functional aspect of the site was built using ASP.NET MVC hosted on Amazon EC2 instance for maximum scalability. This setup was complimented by Kentico Cloud’s speedy API requests, as well as serving heavy multimedia content from its CDN efficiently.

The Berlin Institute for Sound and Music is a nonprofit organization and initiative dedicated to the history and culture of sound, immersive art, and electronic music. Their new site serves as the hub for communicating the goals, news, and events of the Institute. A key benefit here was being able to work with the content from the beginning of the project to ensure that the design and build worked with it. Despite the relatively quick design and build cycle, the content-rich result includes news articles, donation CTAs, and MailChimp signups, which have resulted in a huge increase in visitors, repeat sessions, and conversions. Furthermore, a headless CMS ensures Squareball Digital can re-use content for mobile channels and exhibition screens at a later date.

Magnificent and exceptional, these words could describe Aria Prezioza’s jewelry. Their Tamashii Tibet and Mychau Vietnam brands, and their ethnic bracelets have become an important part of the Italian jewelry and accessories sector. They needed to step forward and create a website with a better UX and a simpler purchasing process for customers. EXETERA srl | Thinking Digital developed Aria Preziosa's website to create one B2C version and another one for B2B customers with an integrated management for agent fees. Their success is more than appealing as sales increased by an incredible 210% and the number of retailers increased by 12%, which improved overall brand awareness. This improvement has been possible due to Kentico’s E-commerce functionalities and within four months of development only.

The new careers microsite for Gowling WLG is the first step in transforming the global law firm’s online recruitment. It has received extremely positive feedback from key stakeholders and successful results include a 137% increase in sessions. The entire site is content manageable and MMT leveraged the widget approach within Kentico to rapidly produce components/features. Using content staging and Kentico Continuous Integration, alongside MMT’s own deployment processes within Azure, the team at Gowling WLG could create content as development continued in parallel. Following the redesign, site visitors increased by 105%, and there was a 400% increase in pages viewed per session.

Hartstichting is a nonprofit organization that needed a process to allow the spreading of knowledge about cardiovascular diseases among those who suffer from a heart condition, their close ones, or anyone interested in getting more information. The new website helped Hartstichting reach this goal—they attracted 3,500 volunteers within the first month of the website launch. Since the nature of the content relies on a visitor's medical condition, the greatest challenge was to provide functionalities such as creating a personalized guide and displaying content relevant to different groups of people without the need to ask visitors for their personal information, tracking their behavior, or the need to create personal logins in order to use the content of the website.

The SteviaSweet brand, which sells Stevia products in six countries, has been repositioned and redesigned to emphasize the naturalness of the product. The website has also been adapted to this objective, giving consumers an idea of how easy it is to consume less sugar. The graphic design had to be personalized for a set of different target groups and brought to life by selectively placed animations. The SteviaSweet design delivers a unique combination of young, fresh, and playful elements together with a very structured way of presenting meaningful information. Small animations prove the brand's love of detail and they bring joy to the user. Kentico’s Custom Web Parts and Personalization for different cultures were especially attractive to Hermes Sweeteners Ltd.

2BScientific is reinventing the supply of life science material to a global market. With beautiful design and UX and brilliant functionality, the new site houses more than 1.6 million products. The redesign placed emphasis on the fact that 2BScientific are different from their competitors, more friendly and approachable, with a personal touch. A modernized brand, responsive and user-friendly front end, and scalable, streamlined back-end functionality, would allow 2BScientific to provide top-quality service to their customers and portray themselves as a current, powerful force in their sector. Syndicut created a range of icons, backgrounds, and graphics to ensure each sector was given their own identity as well as making the site a pleasure to look at and navigate.

A website with a young, fresh feeling and based on time-honored methods exhibits Varo Energy as a large, global brand. DotControl followed the brand-book but without fear of incorporating something ‘new’ with their use of animated gradients, polygon shapes, and bold typography. The new website shows the difference between VARO and the competition, and doesn’t forget to highlight the human and innovative character of the brand. Kentico’s multilingual functionality enabled publishing content in several countries in which the client is active. By adding widgets, DotControl created flexible page types that can be dynamically set up by the administrators. This way, each content page can be unique and still visually appealing.

Van Raam manufacture customized bicycles, which they sell through their global dealer network. They wanted to go further with tracking their customer’s behavior, so they created a mobile app that collects user data through a Bluetooth connection with the bike. Collected data is submitted to the Van Raam Intelligence Portal (VIP) and subsequently presented to the end user. It is possible to show information (model, color, engine type, frame ID, etc.) for one or more bikes, to add a bike, to show maintenance record, statistics (i.e., mileage per week/month/total), settings, recipes, averages, and deviations. Also, a tailor-made dealer module was integrated into the website using Google API, allowing the user to find the nearest dealer based on zip code, city, and country.

The Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) has a fleet of 410 diesel buses and a dedicated team of 1,100 operators, mechanics, and administrative staff. MCTS provides, on average, 150,000 rides every day to people across multiple counties. Ascedia created a website that supports mobile users (85% of visitors use mobile devices) and reflects the organization’s status as one of the top transit systems in the country. The website integrates real-time data from ride planning systems and Google API, and improves accessibility features to make the site user-friendly. The redesign also simplified the administration process so that the MCTS team could quickly and easily schedule route updates and alerts.

Melbourne Airport is the primary airport serving the city of Melbourne and is the second busiest airport in Australia. The site provides a complete resource for information relating to the airport, including flight information, shopping, and parking. Prior to its recent rebuild in Kentico, the site was on a custom proprietary CMS. Pages were slow to load and content administration was clunky. Since the relaunch, average page load speeds have improved by more than 56% and the use of modular page design has vastly increased content management efficiency. The site rebuild was a joint project between Get Started and Hardhat Digital. The website is integrated with various third-party tools: Appian, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Flight Data, VicRoads app, Campaign Monitor, and Airport Noise Tool.

For more than 100 years Compeer Financial has been providing financial products and services to support agriculture and rural communities in the upper Midwest, US. The variety of products and services are reflected in the variety of personas that visit the site. Delivering personalized content to these personas is critical and drives nurtured conversion and loyalty. To make marketing automation processes even more fluent, The Nerdery have developed a custom Marketo connector. Now, using Kentico EMS, Compeer Financial can utilize a breadth of personalized marketing options while empowering content editors to modify and create templates. The current website has a better flow and user experience (especially for mobile). The overall bounce rate has decreased from 66% on the old site to 43% on the new. There is also an increase of 20% in mobile usage since the re-platform.

QIS packaging know how important it is to make an impact on a customer. Founded in 1985, they are Australia's premier online suppliers of retail, warehouse, and moving packaging products. To satisfy various requirements, their sheer number of products amounts to more than 2,200 products. Thus, they wanted a website that was literally the best of breed in terms of User Experience, SEO, Performance, E-commerce functionality, and Conversion Optimization. QIS has been utilizing a lot of Kentico features, such as E-commerce, discounts, promotions, coupons, and from the EMS range, Marketing Automation, Contact Groups, Personas, Lead Scoring, Email Marketing, and many more. Following the new website launch, there has been a 6.5% increase in average order value and 46% increase in sales from mobile devices.

The Investments & Wealth Institute is a professional association that delivers rigorous, practical education, through events, continuing education courses, and acclaimed certifications. Their former website, based on Drupal, contained a lot of legacy content that was poorly organized. The new version took advantage of nearly every Kentico feature available, including Web Farm, Events, Workflows, Roles, User Types, and EMS features such as Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Campaigns, Landing Pages, Integration Bus, REST APIs, and numerous content types. Email Marketing is quite crucial for the Institute as they send a high volume of emails (between 250,000 to 750,000 emails per month).

Watercare supply more than 354 million liters of water to Auckland, New Zealand every day. Delivering this amount of water to a growing population means infrastructure and efficiency are crucial. To keep up with rising pressures, Watercare saw an opportunity to introduce automation to their public website and the ability to improve user experience. This would include a Customer Self Service Portal that would allow customers to access their accounts and pay bills online more efficiently. At the moment, Watercare serves more than 100,000 accounts. To meet Watercare's requirements, Provoke migrated the website from SharePoint to Kentico EMS, and deployed it on a Microsoft Azure Platform. Through Kentico, Provoke was able to create an administration model to assist in managing accounts and reduce administration effort.

Cervus Equipment is a world-leading equipment dealer, powered by iconic brands and passionate people. The aim of this project was to bring together seven separate sites that used custom PHP or Laravel CMS platforms to create greater brand awareness and a better overall user experience—and the results were more than successful, with the website winning a MarCom Gold Award and W3 Design Silver Award. There are multiple integrations, for example, with John Deere’s web services to synchronize information for more than 1,000 products, as well as an integration with MachineFinder to synchronize all John Deere used equipment. An integration with SilkRoad Talent Management system serves to search and present job opportunities across all divisions. Custom Macro rules allow content personalization by dealership.

BrightStar’s dedication to providing the best care services is grounded on the belief that caring is more than just a job—it’s a way of life. The former BrightStar site had more than 300 individual WordPress instances on one domain, which means that each franchise of the business had their own WP Install on the server. A whole migration to Kentico provided the tools for strong governance and a platform flexibility allowed consolidation and optimization of all the pre existing content for SEO into one web-instance. The biggest challenge was migrating 18,000 pages across 300 different WP installs and filtering the content into the correct format needed within Kentico. Now, franchise owners are able to easily add Blogs, Events, Testimonials, and Employee Profiles to their site, all of which are linked to a specific template.

Just as the venue being one of the most beautiful locations in the world, the website design is elegant, using great imagery from the Garden. A key challenge was to incorporate the huge volume of content while maintaining a clean, spacious feel. Webcoda made extensive use of Kentico BizForms to easily produce forms for the many events and inquiries at the Gardens. Using Kentico widgets, the client could organize galleries, quote blocks, tabs, and much more. The increase in traffic on the site demonstrates that the new site is a compelling, informative web destination. For January 2018, there has been a 43% increase in traffic compared to the same period in January 2017. On average, the website receives 100,000 page views and 80,000 visitors per month.

MMT Digital are working with Independent Vetcare (IVC) on a 12-month digital rebrand to create a consistent online presence for the international group of 750+ veterinary practices. IVC needed an easy-to-use website template with a fresh new design to roll out across its practices, bringing them up to date and setting the group apart from its competitors. IVC is extremely pleased with the results and the ease with which the template can be rolled out. To date, 100+ sites have been launched across the group and IVC have seen a 75% increase in organic search traffic as well as a 400% increase in website traffic.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is the leading health statistics agency in Australia. It produces high-quality reports and information products on key health and welfare issues in Australia, used to improve the delivery of health and welfare for Australians. The main complexity of AIHW was that content was to be edited, staged, and reviewed in distinct groups of nodes, rather than node by node. This includes reports that contain a large sub-tree of nodes of varying types, associated images and documents, and top-level information that applies to all nodes beneath it. As proof of the complexity of this website project, it contains 8,200 pages and receives 400k visits per month.