Top 10 Kentico Websites for September 2016

Action Cancer’s mission is to save lives and support local people through cancer awareness, prevention, detection, and support. To improve Action Cancer’s digital presence, i3 Digital brought together findings from research, design workshops, and usability tests to provide a clear design and layout. The main goal of the website was to get more people to book appointments online, so that admin time was saved by staff within the offices’ locations. Many older people use the Action Cancer website, so they needed to be sure the technology allowed a very logical and enjoyable user experience, yet allow for a fully responsive design and include integration with social media platforms. Just to confirm the project’s success: the year before the new website was launched, the site had 85,256 sessions and 271,996 page views. This can be compared to last year’s results (January 1–December 31, 2015) of 110,393 sessions with 342,862 page views.

Read more here

With over 40 years of innovation, the Roland Corporation is a global leading manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, including keyboards and synthesizers, guitar products, electronic percussion, digital recording equipment, amplifiers, and audio processing devices. Roland decided to create a consistent branding and experience among its 42 global sub-sites, and improve its global content maintenance by bringing all the different sites onto a single, convenient platform, both for content and infrastructure. Domain integration was realized within Kentico’s Multilingual feature and IIS’s rewrite functionality. This enables single global product management flow, whereas each country can individually tailor their site content tree to serve their region better. Nextscape gradually wants to use other Kentico EMS features such as Contact Management and Marketing Automation, as well as external CRM and ERP integration.

The Football Republic was formerly a YouTube channel with all the biggest debates and latest reactions from around the world of football—they put football fans at the heart of the action. The idea behind their website was not to duplicate what had already been done, not just provide fans with another blog, but to show how the fans are feeling during a game. The site uses the social data of fans and their real emotions about their favorite teams. Syndicut used an API proved by Blurrt to process and analyze Twitter data to display sentiment-based information in a graphical format. This needed to be done both as a live feed of data for the ‘Buzz’ component and as ‘snapshots’ of data with a timestamp. For this project, Syndicut uses Kentico with the .NET MVC framework, which means Kentico stores data and manages content, and the entire design is managed by MVC controllers and views. A Kentico custom form control was created to consume Ooyala video content. The website utilizes a third-party tool to take screenshots of components, which are then imported into the Kentico Media Library and uploaded to Twitter (using the Twitter API), so they can be used inside tweets and posted to a user's profile.

Lavendon is the European and Middle-Eastern market leader in the rental of powered access equipment. The equipment they provide enables users to work safely, productively, and comfortably at height, whatever the application. The main goals for this website were an easy-to-use Content Management System, a scalable system that could grow as the business grew, and a new fully responsive design. Their key priority was to simplify the user journey when it came to searching for a machine. Challenges came during the designing of the different business units as each area had a different look and feel. Due to this, templates were used that suited the needs of all business units. All sites sit within the same instance of Kentico so the templates and widgets are shared, whilst also providing each business unit the flexibility to tailor slightly their range of machines, as there are subtle differences between each geographical region. As a result of the redesign, following the site launch in October 2015, the number of sessions on the website increased by 127%, based on the same period last year, the number of page views increased by 63%, and overall user numbers increased by 14%.

StudyPoint is a U.S. based provider of one-to-one, in-home, and online tutoring support helping over 30,000 U.S. and international students earn stronger grades and higher test scores to date. Seventyeight Digital was engaged to develop a fully responsive, engaging, user-friendly, interactive information and marketing hub designed to effectively attract qualified leads and support the lead-to-client conversion process. The website is integrated with third-party systems to facilitate data sharing (Sugar CRM, EMS). A large component of StudyPoint’s marketing efforts rely on paid online advertising and direct mail. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of each marketing channel, both general website traffic and lead-to-customer conversions needed to be tracked back to specific campaign ID’s. Another challenging aspect of this project was migrating data from the previous WordPress CMS to Kentico. In the first six weeks following launch (August 23–October 4), the new site has seen increased engagement by 30%-50%, and product specific page visits have demonstrated a similar increase.

With their more-than-40-year’s history, Invisible Fence Brand is the leader in the pet containment industry. Utilizing a newer version of Kentico, the brand undertook a complete website overhaul that needed to improve the process for new customers to start the sales funnel by filling out a sales consultation form and scheduling an appointment. Approximately 300 dealers needed to have access to customize the content (homepage, blog, employee listing, jobs, etc.) on subdomains for their local companies. Each local dealership has their own e-commerce store that sells corporate as well as custom products. Additionally, every dealership has access to a dealer portal where they can report all details on their online orders, sales lead conversions, referrals, etc. The website also supports four payment gateways (PayPal Express, Authorize.NET, etc.) which dealers can select and then enter their unique credentials to receive payments. This complex e-commerce solution also enables the dynamic creation of discount macro conditions, so only discounts work for specific dealers. Tusk Software also leverages Kentico’s Multilingual feature (in the progress of loading translated content) and MVT Testing.

The site needed to reflect Hume’s position as a trustworthy alternative to traditional financial institutions, without losing the sense of community and grassroots support upon which it was founded. One of the key challenges of this site was that it had to cater to a number of very distinct audiences, including personal banking clients, business banking clients, and the general community. The focus was based on how the user consumes financial services, rather than the bank’s internal structures and classifications. For example, a new product selector helps funnel the user directly to the most relevant page by asking a number of simple questions about who they are and what they’re seeking. From a content management perspective, the use of a centralized information table and macros throughout the site has streamlined the process of making changes to content such as rates and product information. Having a centralized repository for this information has not only resulted in significant time savings for Hume Bank, it has also eliminated the risk of inconsistencies across the site.

Origin Architectural are a new-to-market architectural hardware supplier based in Leeds. Their new website should deliver an optimized e-commerce platform empowering users with a knowledge of the products on offer and providing a simple and secure checkout process capable of rapid transactions. Users can easily search, find, and add products into a virtual basket, and Kentico’s “Install Payment Gateway” capability was used to achieve the SagePay integration that handles sale transactions for Origin Architectural. The Guest Checkout using Kentico’s Register After Checkout web part automatically registers shoppers using the guest checkout feature with their email address. This ensures their details are stored and remembered the next time they check out, making their user journey faster and more efficient. In the six months since launch (March 23, 2016 to September 23, 2016) the Origin Architectural website maintained an average session duration of over 2:30 minutes and maintained a bounce rate under 53%. Based on month on month (July 24 to August 23 vs. August 24 to September 23) measurements it was proven that sessions increased by over 250% and page views increased by over enormous 765%.

Wiltshire Farm Foods needed to radically transform their e-commerce website in order to improve their web presence, attract new customers and enhance usability for their audience, which has an older demographic than most traditional e-commerce websites who often prefer to order by telephone. MMT Digital implemented a clean and concise design with a simple navigation and added an intuitive ‘My Account’ page through which a user can easily review, amend, or cancel any of their orders. Wiltshire Farm Foods operates through a number of franchisees and uses various third-party software products so MMT Digital integrated the website with VeriFone and Microsoft Dynamics, as well as bespoke software developed by third party suppliers. The entire website is fully responsive, including the payment page and process. The new website is a significant step beyond the previous platform and will help Wiltshire Farm Foods achieve their objectives.

The My Local Ambulance site AKA The Rural Ambulance Infrastructure Reconfiguration site is a site developed for NSW Health Infrastructure. NSW Health Infrastructure is responsible for the maintenance and development of the infrastructure (mainly buildings) that are used by NSW Health associated organisations. The goals for the site were to inform the public about how NSW Health looks after ambulance facilities in rural areas—with pictures and videos about projects as well as the latest news. One of the key challenges for the site was that, because it is a government site, it had to pass accessibility compliance. Using the built-in accessibility checker in Kentico helped ensure that not only did the design pass, but the content also passed accessibility validation. Another challenge was that the site needed to be delivered in a very short space of time. Using the Kentico portal engine helped deliver the job on time and budget.

Recorded Books is one of the biggest names in the audiobooks industry. They have a reputation for impeccability in everything they do, from customer service to the products themselves. The main aim was to provide Recorded Books with a website that would be in keeping with the digital transformation the industry was taking. This included improving the e-commerce capabilities as well as the search functionality. Additionally, one of the biggest new features was Recommended Titles, which allows users to see books that might be relevant based on previous purchases or peer reviews. Since the website went live in April 2016, Recorded Books has seen a huge 75% increase in sales in comparison to the same period from the previous year. That's not all - the website has experienced an excellent 99% increase in session duration, 63% more pages per session, 10% increase in page views and a 30% decrease in bounce rate. In addition, the project has reduced the costs of ongoing maintenance, increased online sales and given Recorded Books an online platform that allows them to engage better with their clients.