Top 10 Kentico Websites for June 2015

Bottle Solutions is a full service distributor of containers and packaging products. They have many products with a wide array of categories as well as unique options and rules for purchasing. They sell in case quantities and individual quantities with unique pricing for both per respective product. Bottle Solutions wanted a more robust and intuitive e-commerce experience for their customers as well as a platform that was equally intuitive and comprehensive to manage it all. thunder::tech leveraged the Kentico Base License for its product management and e-commerce features. Their developers were able to create five client-specific document types to enable the management and display of products and custom templates for the end-user. For payment processing, thunder::tech extended and configured Authorize.net payment processing through custom programming. Along with custom payment processing, thunder::tech programmed custom shipping options using FedEx APIs. Finally, thunder::tech utilized Kentico’s flexibility to create custom web parts and widgets for the administrators to use and maintain their dynamic and responsive e-commerce website.

HMV has been a respected British high street name for 90 years, famous for offering a personal and unique experience that entertainment fans love. Ridgeway were challenged to bring that experience online by creating a completely new mobile-optimized e-commerce solution to sit alongside the rich content editorial content of hmv.com, and complement the existing ability to purchase digital downloads and tickets online. The site was built on Kentico 8.2 using Ridgeway’s unique Kentico E-commerce Accelerator to reduce the time and cost of traditional development and bolster the functionality of Kentico in areas such as discounts and customer service modules. Ridgeway modeled the look and feel on hmv.com, building an API to create a flow from articles into the store with a “buy now” button. Ridgeway’s technical experts have built real-time communication across fulfillment and product data and have integrated with secure payments through WorldPay by card, PayPal, and V.Me. The first phase of store.hmv.com launched in June 2015 to provide customers with the ability to buy and pre-order DVDs, CDs, Blu-rays, exclusive Steelbooks, and vinyl online. The mobile-optimized responsive design has been well-received by the business and customers alike. Sales have been impressive, with a healthy number of customers coming back for repeat purchasing. Work continues with Ridgeway to recreate the customer experience digitally of the hmv’s physical stores that entertainment enthusiasts love in phased future stages.

Y Soft is a Czech company based in Brno. Their print management solution, Y Soft SafeQ, demonstrably reduces costs, streamlines workflows, and increases document security. Globally, over 8,000 leading Fortune 1,000 and SMB organizations use Y Soft SafeQ in more than 100 countries. Y Soft’s be3D printers are a reliable and affordable way to simplify the manufacturing of prototypes and components. The old website did not suit the company’s modern online marketing demands. The goal was to prepare a modern, mobile-friendly, responsive website that would communicate Y Soft as a multi-product company and would be SEO-optimized for the main keywords connected with its industries. Improving localized versions of their website was also one of the goals, especially having it running in 11 language variants. The other objectives of the new site were to incorporate two independent brands and prepare available space for any future expansion of the portfolio, generate qualified leads into the company’s CRM, which can be given to partners, focus on the North American market, make a large amount of content easily navigable, and prepare the website for future marketing automation. The website is running on Kentico 8.2 and has already achieved a daily increase in site visits of 30%. The website has also started to generate customer leads for their Sales department, which is great additional functionality since the old site did not work as a lead generation tool. It has a responsive design, language versions, emailing, and forms. In order that the potential of the EMS edition of Kentico might be fully exploited in the future, Y Soft integrated, right from the design stage, a quantity of conversion elements that would motivate users to enter their email addresses. With these addresses, they are subsequently able to match up a complete history of tracked activities with a specific user, and then qualify this for the requirements of the sales team. Part of the solution has therefore been integrating the client’s CRM.

JF Recruiting is the market-leading online yacht crew recruitment agency, formed in 2003. There are currently more than 30,000 crew members registered on the website from captains to ancillary workers. Employers have access to crew members' details where they can easily search, view, and select crew members based on wide-ranging criteria. The website allows potential employees to register their personal details, qualifications, skills, and references. In addition, crew can upload a CV and other documents and certificates. Subscriptions for advanced employer functions are purchasable via the site using Kentico’s E-commerce module, through Discover IT’s Sage Pay payment gateway component. The website also offers reference checking functionality – a tool for employers to check crew suitability’s reliability. There are extensive bespoke administration functions, including a module for the speedy approval of new job postings, and there are custom reports particular MI requirements. Additionally, the website aggregates job openings from other job board websites, using a Kentico scheduled task which calls RSS feeds. Due to the diasporic composition of the audience, making all of the features and data returned by the site work on smaller screen devices was critical. Kentico Caching is extensively used, and as the site will often be accessed on lower speed Internet connections, image resizing based on device profiling was set up in Kentico. The site is hosted on Microsoft Azure to allow for easy scalability during sessional peak loading.

The Textile Museum of Canada (TMC) is the only museum in Canada that explores ideas and builds cultural understanding through the universally relevant media of textiles. Located in the heart of downtown Toronto, the Museum’s permanent collection spans nearly 2,000 years and consists of more than 13,000 artifacts. A leader in the digitization of collections and interactive environments, the TMC has been recognized the world over for innovation in the development of landmark educational, research, and creative initiatives. They needed a new, contemporary, online experience for one of the world’s pre-eminent textile museums, including the delivery of new online functionality for online ticketing and donations, as well as reaching new audiences through increased SEO/SEM performance. As cost was a major constraint, ecentricarts needed to deliver a robust, highly functional solution - but one that came at an affordable price tag. Integrating Kentico 8 with third party solutions such as EventBright made this possible. The site was also integrated with the museum’s internal Collections Management system and has multilingual implementation in French and English with mobile responsiveness. Some custom-developed features were added for Exhibitions, and an Events and Programs Calendar.

The CastaDiva Resort offers very exclusive and private villas surrounded by greenery. The unique environment enhances its Italian excellence with a perfect blend of the past and present and art and culture. It is the ideal location for prestigious events, surrounded by the silence of the most romantic Italian lake. Combining style, elegance, and attentive service to customers, the sweet harmony and peace of the eastern shore of Lake Como make it an experience to be savored. The CastaDiva Resort is one of the most important and popular Italian luxury hotels worldwide. Through the CastaDiva website project, they wanted to shake up the contemporary concept of luxury hospitality. Their goal was to catch the attention of a high-target range of customers, by making them live a luxury experience when they browsed the website. KB Solutions had to adapt a dynamic interface for the needs of a multi-lingual responsive-design website. The main menu page can be accessed through a simple and intuitive interface, allowing users immediate access to content and the possibility of enjoying vertical navigation. It took about three months to build this new website, and the CastaDiva Resort has seen a dramatic increase in traffic.

The University of Westminster is a public research university in London, the United Kingdom. It offers a wide range of Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional, and Short courses to both UK and International students. To provide a comprehensive University of Westminster Open Day experience for prospective students who couldn’t attend an open day in person, the aim of the project was to give students and their parents an insight into both the institution (campuses, accommodation, courses available, etc.) and its students’ way of life. The main challenge was to create a solution that attracts an international audience. Integrating with the University’s CRM system (Syndicut had to make customizations in order for the CRM to integrate with Kentico). Built on Kentico 8.1, the site generated over 250 new admissions placements in the first six months since launch – an approximate value of over £1 million per year. The site was built to be fully responsive using a customized version of the bootstrap framework. They utilized the Grunt task manager to automate as much of their front-end build as possible. Syndicut chose to use ASP.NET MVC Razor v5 to create a lightweight and performance efficient web application. The site utilizes MVC Ajax Request to pull back specific content from the CMS using the Kentico API. The user has the ability to save a visitor’s  tour once created, which stores the configured tour preferences in a custom table and sends the user a unique URL that can be used to return to the site at a later date. Syndicut also created a custom Azorus CRM integration solution by creating a Kentico Scheduled task (coupled with a Windows Service) that automatically pushed XML data to the CRM via SFTP. One of the requirements was to feature as much rich video content as possible throughout the site. Syndicut, therefore, created a custom YouTube/Vimeo form control that utilizes the YouTube/Vimeo API to perform the lookup of a video and then generate a responsive markup. This way, the user can preview the video in the CMS as well as the video title, description and thumbnail being automatically populated.

Bergbahnen Flumserberg AG is responsible for the tourist destination Flumserberg, an amazing winter and summer resort in Switzerland. Flumserberg’s beautiful mountain environment offers a wide range of interesting and unique activities for holidaymakers and sports enthusiasts. Flumserberg has been a client of Goldbach Interactive since 2005. The goals of the site were the promotion of the Flumserberg holiday/activity area and to attract tourists by showing summer and winter activities, as well as hotels. Some of the challenges that were overcome during the project were the content integration of different external providers within the website, e.g., the hotel and apartment booking tool, webcams, and the events calendar. The multi-language feature of Kentico was used as well as the Full-Text Search. The website is fully responsive.

Perfectly situated on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, amongst Queensland's 74 Whitsunday Islands, Hamilton Island offers an experience like no other: glorious weather, azure waters, brilliant beaches, awe-inspiring coral reefs, fascinating flora and fauna, fine food and wines, and activities almost too numerous to mention. Hamilton Island’s outdated digital platforms were costing them direct sales. The site, which staff found cumbersome to maintain, was even more difficult for customers to use and resulted in low conversion and reduced revenue. The site is mobile device responsive to ensure customers can plan their vacation on any device and interact with the social features on-the-go or on the island. The data feeds from the inventory also serve to power the mobile app, which can be used as an on-island guide. Kentico 8’s integration with Stacklaand, Hamilton Island’s popular Twitter and Instagram accounts, brings the website to life with their audience’s own content. Alongside robust technical foundations, Kentico provided the marketing intelligence required for the project to achieve its potential, using Web Analytics, Campaign Management, E-mail Marketing, A/B and MVT Testing, Contact Management, Lead Scoring, Personalization, Segmentation, and Automation. The site is published in multiple languages. When a new page / section is added in the predominant language used (English), alerts are automatically issued to Content Editors responsible for the other languages. They have already seen the average purchase increase by 14.37% and cart abandonment reduced by 7.96%. Average time on site has increased to over 3 minutes, with overall conversion to purchase increasing by 75.63%, a great result for the client. Hamilton Island had over 159,598 users in the first 3 weeks, with return visitors up by 4%. Finally, internal time to manage the site content has halved since the launch.

In 2014, Aqueo (Havaianas Australia’s parent company) engaged Devotion to design and create an entirely new e-commerce platform for the business to better leverage online sales and deliver business efficiencies. To meet all of Havaianas Australia’s requirements, Kentico EMS was selected. While Havaianas had been selling online for a few years, their previous site had technical shortcomings and performance issues, failed to offer a positive user experience, and was tailored only for desktop browsing. Its back office integration (with SAP) was also extremely limited in terms of extensibility and flexibility. Devotion Digital’s key goals were to create the brand’s highest performing retail outlet/shopfront in Australia, with a bright, fun, easy-to-use online shopping experience. Because Kentico comes with a flexible and extensible API, Devotion Digital’s developers could easily leverage existing functionality, as well as extend the system to meet bespoke requirements. The Kentico API was key when it came to migrating data, such as customer data and discount promotional codes from the former site. As well as revamping the website, gift card purchase and redemption was integrated as a new feature for customers. The out-of-the-box discount coupon functionality was extended Devotion’s developers to support unlimited, one-time-use per customer or one-time-use discount coupons in the shopping cart, as well as maintaining the history of gift card use on the site. The new functionality also enabled the user to email or print gift cards from the site, and special discounts with secure credit card and PayPal payment options. The interactive “Make your own” tool was built using the Kentico E-commerce API. It utilized a combination of out-of-the-box features as well as customized modules and web parts. The overall project development took roughly four months over a 12-month period, largely due to the SAP upgrade challenges experienced by Havaianas Australia. For the six months after launch, Havaianas Australia experienced a huge 30% increase in online revenue. For the twelve months after launch, they have also had a 35% increase in the number of user sessions, and a 27% increase in the number of users.