Kentico Top 10 Websites for November 2016

Their prior online experience was not consistent with the experience that Cleveland Steel Tool provides offline. They offer speed, accuracy, quality, and custom solutions that cannot be beaten. Their current digital appearance has quite a different look and feel. Changes on the website now enable products to be found, based on their relevance to a particular customer’s situation, in any number of ways. Cleveland Steel Tool has thousands of items listed and when they need to make a change to a price, or correct a description or a dimension, they can now implement the change themselves immediately. The site also needed to be responsive and drive more online orders and leads. After the website redesign, Cleveland Steel Tool achieved 144% increase in page views, 95% increase in sessions, 70% increase in unique visitors, or 70% increase in new visitors. No more to say, other than, congratulations on such excellent results!

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East of England Co-op is an independent co-op owned by over 275,000 members. In 2014 Crafted inherited their previous desktop Umbraco site. Although the site evolved during this time, including a new funeral-plan checkout and mobile specific store finder, it was clear as plans were being discussed for 2016 that the site needed a drastic overhaul, including the infrastructure it was originally based on. East of England’s primary goals were to increase engagement with the brand by visits to the store finder, lower bounce rate on content, direct calls to East of England Co-op, and increase conversion on funeral plan purchases online. The website is structured to improve organic SEO that is also supported by increased site speed. A user engagement is leveraged by improved site functionality and responsiveness for an increasingly mobile audience. Kentico e-commerce functionalities allow updating of the admin while going through the checkout process that is supported by PayPal integration. Kentico’s Shopping Cart/Order fields were easily modified to add all the extra information that was needed. Mobile organic visibility improved by 62% and in terms of organic traffic, the site has seen an increase in session duration by 16.06%, in pages per session by 8.92%, and in page views by 4.58%.

Benton PUD is a public utility that provides reliable electrical services to more than 51,000 customers in Kennewick, Prosser and surrounding areas of Benton County, Washington. Planeteria Media realized that as a service organization, one of the key challenges for Benton PUD was getting customers use online forms and fill the correct forms for the services they needed. With this in mind, they developed a website that is easy to use for customers, visually appealing, modern, and easy to update for administrators. Unique multi-step forms were created, where the customer starts by answering simple Yes/No questions, and depending on the answers, the correct form (Start Service form or Transfer service form) is shown to the user. Some of the challenges that had to be overcome were the provision of the tools (search/sort, etc.) to the administrators for managing the large amount of data, content types on the website, and the designing, developing, and programming for the many Online Forms on the website. The project was built on Kentico Base License, v 9.0.21 with a launch date in Oct 2016 and it is already showing an increase in the number of Online Form submissions.

Sanitarium is a Health & Wellbeing Company focused on child and family focus group. Their former CMS was slowing down the organisation's ability to move and react with the latest digital trends and needs of their users. One of the primary goals was to move from Sitecore to Kentico and, also, to create a fully responsive website and to shift the website content strategy away from a product-focused approach to an online editorial experience. Content priority was defined via a set of simple rules based on recent, popular, featured, and related content. This has been created in a way that will allow Sanitarium to adopt Kentico Personas as site traffic grows and the web teams become confident with the new platform. Sanitarium has seen excellent results across the board with improved Google ranking for the site content and higher than expected jumps in mobile and tablet traffic. This, despite a considerable re-write of the site’s content.

With currently 170 employees at seven locations in Austria and southern Germany, VERO is one of the three biggest insurance brokers in Austria. Its customers mainly consist of medium-sized businesses and freelancers. The main focus of VERO is generating satisfied clients by delivering highly professional solutions with extraordinary quality through personal consulting and perfect customer care. Kentico gives VERO the possibility to react quickly and flexibly to the current developments in the sector and supply their customers accordingly and on a daily basis with the latest necessary information. Furthermore, an individual solution was programmed, a grid system, making it possible to create and flexibly arrange various content elements in the so-called “masonry” style. Thanks to this, the website presents itself with a state of the art responsive design with both an emotional and simultaneously a user-friendly concept and layout.

Frantz Ward LLP, a full-service law firm based in Cleveland, serves a national client base, including Fortune 500 companies, small and medium-sized businesses, and individuals. Created with the user's experience in mind, their new website provides visitors with more relevant, easy-to-locate information. This design ensures that visitors will have easy access to the latest news and information that is important to them. The Home Page highlights a wide range of articles and stories on topics useful to clients. The content of the Home Page changes regularly as the firm's highly engaged attorneys publish more. Call-to-action buttons and points of interactivity are built-in throughout the site to help direct visitors to the information that will be most valuable to them. These aspects are clearly verified by the words of Christopher G. Keim, Partner, and member of the Frantz Ward Management Committee: "The website has a clean and uncluttered design that connects our clients to relevant information quicker and more accurately mirrors the firm's open, approachable culture."

With its 19 years history, Teta Drogerie is one of the biggest drugstore retailers in the Czech Republic. Their former website has undergone a complete redesign—its functionalities were significantly broadened and enriched by new marketing tools. During the last three years, the Teta company has worked on rebranding and improving their presentation, which was followed by an improvement in their digital presentation. The aim of their new website was to provide content, specializing in cosmetics, beauty, and health, in the form of a fresh lifestyle magazine. The Kentico solution that Sprinx Systems has provided enables easy administration and updating of a big amount of actual content. This is quite important as the Teta company wants to systematically extend the website content in the future. The website utilizes Marketing Automation, Email Marketing and Content Personalization from a broad variety of Kentico EMS features.

Sikorsky Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in Connecticut, was looking to overhaul the look and feel of its website, introduce a responsive design, improve the member experience, increase CMS functionality, and ultimately create a digital branch. ZAG recommended Kentico to Sikorsky Credit Union based on their short and long-term website goals. Kentico offered a secure, easy-to-use CMS, responsive design, custom Web Parts, and built-in SEO fields, as well as the ability for Sikorsky Credit Union to grow over time. It will also allow Sikorsky Credit Union to pursue Marketing Automation and Personalization in the future. Additionally, the ability for Kentico to be customized and integrated with other systems made it especially appealing to Sikorsky Credit Union staff. The project took seven months to complete and the site launched on November 1, but already it has seen a drop in bounce rates, an increase in new users, and 30% of all site traffic is now from mobile users.

Quanex Building Products Corporation wanted a responsive site design on the latest version of Kentico and they needed a better internal site structure with simplified Page Types to streamline Content Management. They were interested in the Personas, workflow, Multivariate testing, and other features in Kentico EMS. They also had eight foreign language sites, each managed as separate sites. This made managing the international content much more difficult. Their previous site implementation by another company was customized to the point where it was difficult to manage content, but they were an existing Kentico Client and liked the platform so much they decided to stay with Kentico. By leveraging Kentico CMS Portal Engine and Custom Page Types, together with a revised site structure and localization features for international sites Codesummit was able to simplify the Content Management and related data. The project took six months to complete and by moving to Kentico 9 the site load times increased by 50%, the pages views were down as the structure provided easier access to the content their customers needed, and downloads of PDF files increased.

Paliwoda AG did not have an e-shop before and so the challenge was to provide them with a simple but responsive e-shop where the customers would be able to choose their products and get all the information needed. Because their old site was built with Kentico, Paliwoda AG already knew how to create pages, implement text or images, etc. and from a developer point of view, the large amount of Kentico modules and web parts helped to effortlessly create a shop without having to use a lot of custom code. E-commerce modules were just some of the modules used from Kentico and a custom Page Type was created, where a page is made in relation to a product, to get all the SKU information. Other Page Types were also used for normal pages and overview pages. The whole checkout process could also be created easily with the “Checkout Wizard Manager” web part of Kentico, so no custom programming was needed for this. The E-commerce module of Kentico is really outstanding and it helped the customer to apply discounts, rules, and other SKU settings to their products in a very easy way. Kentico version 8.2.43 was used and the project was implemented in two months with no major challenges.

Stride Group are a new company, founded by a leading expert within the business coaching and mentoring industry. Working with a marketing strategist, they developed a brand identity that was translated into a digital strategy—create an engaging, lively experience which funnels through qualified leads. There was a need to create a website with a strong in-platform SEO capability, that was easy to use for the client and their customers, and lastly, which stood out from the competitors within the industry. The website utilises the Survey Function that the client was instantly impressed by, recognising the ability to use it to engage with the market (something others in the space are not) and to capture information which they could use to improve the experience. Additionally, custom Forms with automated notifications were utilised, as well as a custom URL redirection module to maintain SEO performance with the new site launch.