Top 10 Kentico Websites for August 2013

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Let’s take a tour of the excellent Kentico websites reported by our partners and clients in August. We are impressed by the quality of sites and well-known brands that currently use Kentico CMS as their platform of choice – ACE Rail, TechEd New Zealand, SCRUM Alliance, Britain & Ireland's Next Top Model, Iowa Wesleyan College, Starbucks New Zealand, etc
ACE_Rail.png ACE Rail, The Altamont Commuter Express (as it was originally known) was established to serve San Joaquin County residents traveling to work at firms in Santa Clara County. 

Built on Kentico CMS v7, the primary goals of the site are to reflect the benefits of traveling the train, as opposed to the previous site which just reflected train info. There was originally three public facing sites that needed to be merged into a single site that is easy to use and manage. This new site targeted the various user types; current riders, new riders, groups, and leisure travelers. The ultimate goal was to streamline the ticketing process.

Utilizing a responsive website design approach to enhance user viewing experience, simplify device targeting, and unify the current disjointed user experience. It created a ticketing system that allows for dynamic product pricing, e-tickets, monthly payments, and custom discounts: limited quantity, single use, and complex bulk discount.

By leveraging Kentico and its ease of integration with a custom e-commerce, along with AJAX mega menus, responsive design, service alerts, reusable content widget, and live train status. The goals were met for this site.

ACE Rail
Implemented by:
PMC, USA
Kentico Gold Partner
Scrum_Alliance.png Scrum Alliance, a nonprofit professional membership organization providing advocacy, community and education to encourage and support the widespread adoption and effective practice of Scrum.
 
The goals of this new site was to update the look and feel and deliver the site as a fully responsive design solution, improve the overall site architecture and define paths to content by persona, provide a rich and intuitive content management experience for site admins, improve organic SEO results and minimize the impact of typical organic page loss during the site migration of such a large site, improve and standardize user group functionality, integrate email marketing and lead nurturing to build the size of their marketing lists and influence, and to centralize membership management and engagement around a Kentico-based solution.

Build on Kentico CMS v7, there were several features used to create the site we see today.  Leveraging  Kentico Users integrated in with back-end systems, pulling in mapping and geo-location for courses, events, and trainers. There are also multiple blogs, user submitted articles and Banner Management. There are many more exciting things in the works with this site so stay tuned

Scrum Alliance
Implemented by:
Burns Marketing, USA
Kentico Gold Partner
 
TechEd.png TechEd New Zealand 2013 is an annual Microsoft conference for developers and IT professionals. It is held in several locations around the world.
 
The Microsoft TechEd New Zealand site this year was built on Kentico and hosted in Windows Azure Websites. The site was the first port of call for anyone seeking information or wishing to attend TechEd this year. It handled ticket sales, the call for content process, session and room scheduling, and the all-important online schedule builder for delegates wanting to manage which sessions they were attending.
 
Developed in Kentico EMS (v7) monthly subscription  on Azure and it used lots of key components such as Ecommerce, Responsive Design, Workflow, Versioning, Newsletters & Reporting.
 
This site handled over a half a million page requests in the 4 days of the conference. TechEd New Zealand was hailed as a major success this year with many top tier international speakers coming down from Microsoft, including Scott Guthrie.

TechEd New Zealand 2013
Implemented by:
Marker Studio, New Zealand
Kentico Gold Partner
 
IA_WesleyanCollege.png Iowa Wesleyan College is a fully accredited, coeducational liberal arts college, Founded in 1842, it has a rich history of innovation in education, pioneering in the sciences, educational opportunities for women and service-learning, to name just a few.  The goals of the site are to serve as a primary information resource for the college’s many constituencies, primarily prospective students, current students, faculty/staff, alumni, parents and community. To make it easy for people (primarily alumni and parents) to stay connected to the college.
 
The new site built on Kentico CMS v7 was to meet the primary objective of improving both the appearance and functionality of the college’s website. A number of improvements were made ranging from the addition of online giving, to a CMS that allows multiple people to change and update their sections of the site, to responsive design that allows users of tablets, smart phones and other devices to see and use the site.

Iowa Wesleyan College
Implemented by:
Yoodle Corp, USA
Kentico Gold Partner
 
Britian’s and Ireland’s Next Top Model is a reality television series which has been running since 2005, the show offers contestants the opportunity to compete for a modeling contract to kick start their modeling career.

Built on Kentico CMS v7 the website needed to interact in real-time with the televised shows each week. It also needed to ensure that the site responded with immediacy to any contestant eliminations, model news and show updates by scheduling releases (using Kentico publish from/to feature) to ensure content went live at specified times. There was also a big Social factor that came into play with this site which tied into the digital campaigns and social media buzz. There was also several site editors needed to keep up with the constantly changing content on this site. Kentico made it easy to add additional CMS logins and train admin users in content management.

Britain’s and Ireland’s Next Top Model
Implemented by:
Syndicut,  United Kingdom
Kentico Gold Partner

 
Spirit of ’45  is a website that supports the Ken Loach’s film, The Spirit of ’45. The film focuses on the pivotal era post WWII in British History. The website needed to ensure the message of the film was carried through into digital format using imagery, data, key events and interview footage to provide a rich and immersive user experience. The goal of the website was to add to the film rather than diluting its message and historical importance. The website intended to support the film in developing a new audience, a younger generation of people with whom this topic would not traditionally be associated.

Built on Kentico CMS v7 leveraging Windows Azure Hosting, the site is fully accessible and works across all current browsers and devices. The site needed a very secure, reliable, scalable platform to ensure heavy traffic spikes were handled.

Spirit of ‘45
Implemented by:
Syndicut, United Kingdom
Kentico Gold Partner
 
Members Health Insurance is a company in the Farm Bureau family in Tennessee. Its parent company, TRH Health Plans has been providing Medicare Supplements plans since 1966.  There were several goals achieved in this Website Redesign. There is a new look and feel which now provides a clean, professional design that supports and strengthens the company’s brand image. Navigation was enhanced to make it easier for visitors to find the information they needed on the site.
 
Built with Kentico CMS v7 Ultimate License there is now an easy way for the content authors to update the content on the site that change frequently. This site also leverages SEO best practices, while enhancing the site for increasing lead generation.

Members Health Insurance
Implemented by:
Wakefly, Inc, USA
Kentico Gold Partner
Starbucks New Zealand is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 20,891 stores in 62 countries. This site was built specifically to share the information about the Starbucks brand with the New Zealand’s coffee-loving public. Included on the website are store locations w/ Google Map for each store to drive business. There is also a section for contact us so that they can collect customer feedback.
 
This site was migrated off of a legacy CMS into Kentico CMS to make it easier for site editors to update the content. There was also the enhancements such as responsive design for mobile and tablet visitors.

Starbucks New Zealand
Implemented by:
Marker Studio, New Zealand
Kentico Gold Partner
 

 
Crown Resorts, is one of Australia’s largest entertainment groups. It has a business and investments in the integrated resort and entertainment sectors in Australia and Macau and wholly-own and operates a high-end casino in London.

Crown Resorts
Implemented by:
Banjo Advertising, Australia
Kentico Partner