Kentico Xperience Implementation
BizStream specializes in Kentico, and that's evident in their depth of knowledge and familiarity with the product. I felt confident that they were up to speed on the latest version of Kentico and would develop my project in a timely manner. From a purely content management system perspective, Kentico has a lot of strengths. While my project doesn't leverage all the great features, we were able to add functionality easily without a long development process and will continue to do so as our business requirements change. I would have no hesitation in recommending Kentico for CMS projects.
Samantha Dennis - Senior Web Developer
Goals
Trustmark Solutions engaged with BizStream for the re-design of the www.trustmarksolutions.com website based on marketing needs, as their parent company’s website, www.trustmarkcompanies.com, had been recently re-designed.
The following needs were identified early on as a part of the project scope:
- Redesign of Site. Redesign Trustmark Solutions’ website to create a cohesive look and feel across all business entities’ sites, including www.trustmarkcompanies.com.
- Update Functionality. Create a fully functional site, as Trustmark Solutions’ previous site was outdated and losing the ability to support content administrator’s needs.
- Enhance Security. Provide a secure site to eliminate opportunities for malicious attacks.
- Enhance User Experience. Create a website that was easy for users to navigate. Trustmark Solutions wanted to ensure:
- Blogs and Real-Life Stories were easily assessable and could be found through Category and Tag searches.
- The “Contact Us” page could be filtered by types of inquiries.
- Website visitors could easily find Regional Sales Directors by location.
- Responsive Design. Trustmark Solutions wanted a mobile-friendly, responsive design that would allow users to easily view specialized features across multiple devices, including smartphone, tablet, desktop and laptop.
- Highlight Product Videos. Trustmark Solutions needed users to have the ability to easily find and view product videos.
- Flexibility for Content Administrators. Redesign and develop a site that would allow the marketing team to maintain and update all website content on their own, including the flexibly to categorize videos, blogs and Real-Life Stories in-house all without the involvement of IT.
Challenges
The biggest challenges to Trustmark Solution’s implementation included:
- Level of Customization. There were multiple custom developed areas of the site such to ensure goals such as the “Broker Locator” and enhanced blogs and stories searches were met.
- Marketing Friendly Landing Pages. Extra effort was spent building three unique landing pages for Trustmark Solutions’ blog page.
- Migration from Outdated Platform. The previous version of Trustmark Solutions’ site was running on an outdated platform. This made the site unstable and migration a difficult task.
- Multiple Environments. Ensuring synchronization of both code and content across multiple environments including development, staging and production.
- Complex mobile first design. The design requirements placed specific attention on the mobile user’s experience. Functionality for videos and stories, as well as the Broker Locator map and Contact Us page, changed drastically for mobile applications.
Solution
One of the greatest parts of this project was the relationship between BizStream and Trustmark—the result of having collaborated on a previous project together. The client was familiar with the Kentico platform and felt confident that BizStream would have a working understanding of their processes and style. This partnership played a large role in the project’s success and led to solutions and strategies such as:
- Having the flexibility to allow the client to design the website internally.
- The ability to leverage:
- Kentico’s custom table feature and universal viewer feature to work properly with the image map (Broker Locator) code provided by the client.
- Kentico’s built in tag and category content filters for blogs and Real Life Stories.
- Standard Kentico Portal Engine to develop the site in a fully responsive manner, utilizing Kentico’s responsive design templates.
- BizStream utilized Toolkit for Kentico to make environment synchronization simple and precise.
- Reworked original code to create a fully responsive website that’s easy for the client to edit and maintain going forward.
Key Criteria for Choosing Kentico
The client’s aforementioned existing understanding of Kentico’s portal engine, ease of use, and scalability:
- ASP.Net based enterprise quality web CMS
- Made Kentico especially attractive as a platform.
- Afforded BizStream more room to move quickly on building the website, making the most of the tight deadline.
- Assured the website would be easy for the marketing team to maintain internally.