Top 10 Kentico Websites for April 2015

Morgan Hunt is one of the top recruitment agencies in the UK, offering specialist recruitment services to a diverse range of clients in the public, not for profit, and commercial sectors. The website goals are to provide a superior user experience for both jobseekers and clients posting jobs. The simplicity and versatility of the job search function are key, together with the rich blog content and sophisticated My Account area. The site is designed and built to be a highly valuable tool for a jobseeker, making it easy to find matching jobs, set up job alerts, and apply for positions. By providing a highly data driven site, significant use was made of Kentico Caching in order to optimize page loads while still providing users with real-time job counts and latest article data. In addition, the standard search functionality was enhanced in order to meet the range and number of filters available to refine search results. Considerable SEO investment had already been made on the site and Kentico’s friendly URL and document aliasing features were utilized in order to keep this in place. Kentico CMS v8.1.10 was used for the project. The standard Kentico user profile was extended with custom form controls that integrate with cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google, and OneDrive, allowing users to pick files (CV in this context) from their cloud service and store it with their Kentico user account. The site is highly optimized for mobile, providing a rich user experience for smaller devices, as well as desktop. All features and functionality available for a desktop user have been supported on mobile. Significant use of Kentico’s Hierarchical Menu web part has been used to implement the mega menus seen on the main navigation and also the landing page for jobseekers (http://www.morganhunt.com/jobseekers). Finally, a combination of Kentico’s scheduled task and email engine are used to deliver job alerts based on user preferences, executed on a daily basis.

Australian Seniors Insurance Agency is a well-respected provider of quality insurance products targeted at Australians over 50 years old. Australian Seniors have developed a trusted brand that delivers competitive premiums reflective of the improved risk profile of its target market. A new responsive website was needed for Australian Seniors that effectively positions the organization, delivering on the primary goal of serving customers with relevant information about Australian Seniors products and services, and helping to generate an increase in new business. The new site incorporates the current Final Expenses satellite site to bring all the websites under one framework. The new website is scalable and supports the future growth of Australian Seniors, providing a user experience that is intuitive and clear for all types of users. The first challenge faced was to create a fully responsive design, incorporating various data structures across content pages and tables suitable for senior citizens, ensuring content is clearly and cleanly presented without overloading the user with all the information related to an information-heavy product/service. Also, it was challenging to work with several stakeholders from ASIA themselves and their underwriters, sometimes with conflicting expectations and requirements. Kentico 8 was used to deliver the project.  The website is fully responsive with many complex responsive tables all content-managed through Kentico. We've made extensive use of Kentico's content management framework, with Document Types, structured data, and structured Templates forming an important part of the content workflow. The Forms module was also utilized to support the lead conversion focus of the site. 

Action Cancer are Northern Ireland’s largest Cancer charity and have been a client of i3 Digital’s since 2008. Initially, the site was built using Kentico V3. The site was tired, outdated, and some of the functionality the client wished to achieve on the site was simply not possible in version 3. The client tendered for an enterprise-level CMS that would meet their requirements – A responsive, e-commerce site with a modern look and feel that met their target audience‘s needs. Some of the challenges that needed to be overcome included understanding their various audience groups and specific needs and translating these onto the website as well as creating a design that encouraged people to participate on the website and with the organization. Since its launch, the site, running on version 8.2, has encountered an upsurge in new visitors visiting the site for the first time and a notable increase in donations through the site as well as products purchased through the online shop. Integral to the success of the project was that the site met the needs of the vast majority of users who used their mobile device to access the website, and a mobile first approach was adopted to the design. Also, Action Cancer were keen to provide services such as a custom Service Map, which outlined their many charitable stores, upcoming events, office premises locations, and the location of health services.

Spiaggia Romea is a resort in the lovely surrounds of the Po Delta, a territory in Italy recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The new website was created to keep up with the evolution of the tourism industry using all possible channels and anticipating many trends of digital marketing. The main goals of the new site were to develop the website using a responsive design in order to ensure a smooth and immediate access on the go, to create a revamped graphic design to highlight the beauty of the holiday complex, and to provide the best user experience with navigation paths tailored to the tourists needs. There were a number of challenges faced including integration with a third party ERP system, optimization of the process of measuring the conversions from advertising campaigns, and strengthening the visibility on Search Engines. Kentico 8.2 was chosen for the site to achieve the goals and overcome the challenges while also allowing for the site to be developed in four languages. When comparing the analytics data for two consecutive periods (old site to new site) you can see a significant growth in sessions – up by 30%, organic traffic – up by 21%, mobile traffic – up by 28%, and contacts – up by 9%. There are also some very significant growth results when comparing the same period from this year vs. last year with the greatest being an increase of 61% in mobile traffic.

Conner Prairie is one of the largest attractions in Indiana and one of the most visited outdoor museums in the country with a long history of innovation that spans the fields of science, history, art, and nature. There were a number of goals that were outlined for the new website including a responsive design, a simplified and optimized navigation, the incorporation of Rich Media Content, a more visually engaging design to better showcase Experience Areas, a more user-centric search capability, and an improved calendar functionality tied to social media and allowing a complex calendar to seem simple on a mobile device. The website is running on Kentico EMS v8.0.21 that allowed for built-in social sharing and responsiveness. There were also several custom modules created specifically for managing the grounds and balloon schedule as well as complex taxonomy. Finally, there was some custom development using Kentico best practices regarding global event handling.

Racing Queensland is a Queensland State Government Statutory Board and the peak control body for thoroughbred, harness, and greyhound racing. Racing Queensland coordinates, manages, and regulates the industry through a number of distinct functions ranging from the administration of racing, through to research and promotional activities. A full website redesign was needed to provide more up-to-date functionality, improve the event calendar and content hierarchy, and bring the three codes of racing under one identity. Racing Queensland wanted to combine all three codes of racing and provide unique user journeys for industry professionals and the general public. Designing a solution that would cater to such varied needs while being fully responsive, visually appealing, and utilize Kentico’s EMS capabilities was an enormous challenge. The website is running on Kentico EMS version 8.2 and currently uses the Kentico Banner functionality as well as Newsletters, Forms, and Personalization, which has been extended to allow content personalization to unauthenticated and authenticated users.

Groundforce offers total solutions to the construction industry dealing in Shoring equipment, piling equipment, pipe stoppers, air pressure testing, pump hire and sale, trenchless technology, temporary bridges, and excavation training. They are part of a much larger group – VP Plc,  which is a well-established group having evolved over nearly 60 years of trading from a broadly based plant hire company to a service based group providing equipment rental and associated services to a range of market sectors. VP comprises six business divisions; Groundforce, UK Forks, Airpac Bukom Oilfield Services, Hire Station, Torrent Trackside, and TPA. The purpose of this development project was to update the main Groundforce website that was based on an obsolete CMS and improve speed, functionality, and usability. Groundforce had various other websites that include a technical library, sales website, and geographical websites that are currently independent. This project is to incorporate all websites into a one-domain strategy on a fully responsive website. It was a challenge to integrate seven business divisions as well as language variants, a migration of the technical library, and the complex product ordering system. Since its launch the average page load speed has decreased by 2 seconds compared to the older site and the initial bounce rate is down by 6%. Running on Kentico 8.2 the website benefits from platform features such as multi-lingual capabilities, responsive design, e-commerce, a Media Hub, and a Technical Library.

Commercial Radio Australia Ltd. is the national industry body, representing 260 of Australia's commercial radio broadcasters. Commercial Radio Australia pursues a range of issues on behalf of its member stations. The Commercial Radio Australia website acts as an industry website for various stakeholders. The site underwent a complete redesign, focusing on providing members, agencies, media, and all stakeholders with an easy to navigate design that was clean, uncluttered, and provided easy access to information and resources. The target audiences for the website are Commercial Radio Australia members, media buyers, media agencies, and industry contacts. Initially, the challenges were to build the site within the specified timeframe. This was a challenge given that Commercial Radio Australia changed developers during the development of the site. Commercial Radio Australia staff had to be trained on how to upload and amend the content as the Kentico platform had not been used before. The website also had to cater for a vast range of different target audiences. The launch of the refreshed Commercial Radio Australia website attracted an extensive amount of PR exposure, with an impressive number of mentions in trade and media publications. Being an industry body, Commercial Radio Australia’s corporate website acts more as an information source, rather than a platform to drive leads and sales inquiries.

Macintosh Retail Group runs retail stores specializing in shoe fashion and home fashion in The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom. Next to the retail store, they run Intreza.nl, a web-only store. Aviva Solutions developed all of the web shops, based on the premise that all the shops have to share the same platform but have to be able to differ in look. So stevemadden.eu shares the same templates as sister stores but differs in the stylesheet and of course images. This was also one of the main challenges; creating a platform to host 15 different web shops in 3 languages. The advantage for Macintosh is that if some functionality is created for one shop, it can easily be rolled out to the other sites as they share the exact same code. For Macintosh, Aviva Solutions integrated Kentico with Microsoft Commerce Server. Microsoft Commerce Server handles the catalog, checkout, accounts, and marketing aspects of the shop, and Kentico is used for the content management. FredHopper was also integrated for their faceted search capabilities.

Dufflet Pastries is Toronto's finest purveyor of pastries. Started in 1975, Dufflet Pastries features three retail locations and a wholesale division that proudly supplies over 500 restaurants, cafes, hotels, caterers, grocers, and specialty gourmet shops throughout Canada and the US. When Dufflet was looking to update their online presence, they turned to The Pixel Shop to design and develop a solution that would capture the quirky and fun essence of the company's brand and also provide a robust set of tools that would enhance the website experience for their retail and wholesale customer bases. Built on CMS Version 8, Kentico provided the foundation for a number of custom applications on the site, including "Find a Retailer" which allows customers to locate stores that carry Dufflet products, based on postal code, city, or geolocation. Dufflet's extensive 200+ SKU product offering is managed completely using Kentico's e-commerce module with plans to extend the functionality to include full fulfillment and payment workflow in the near future. Kentico's custom document types, blog engine, and online forms were also utilized in developing the site. The Dufflet team is thrilled that they can manage all aspects of the site in-house with minimal technical knowledge and that tasks can be allocated to different contributors within their organization.