Working with Kentico has been a breeze! After using a complicated platform in the past, I found Kentico to be both user-friendly and easy to acclimate to. I was able to begin making updates almost instantly, and the speed at which I’m able to edit content makes a huge difference in my work day. We have only just begun using some of Kentico’s many exciting features, I’m eager to see where we will go from here!
Ashley Barberi - Senior Digital Marketing
Goals
UFCW 951’s previous website was a static site managed in Dreamweaver. As the union has grown and labor laws have changed, UFCW 951 is working to provide its members increased protections and value for their union dues.
Short- and long-term goals for www.ufcw951.org include:
- Move from static website to CMS
- Update the look of the site and improve user experience with better design, architecture, and navigation
- Manage and update the site internally with a straight-forward content management system
- Ability to manage many events and news items with minimal time
- Promote union membership
- Provide members with expansive information
- Establish a fully responsive website
- Allow members to access members-only information and to securely update contact information by registering and logging into the website
- Ability for vendors to validate union membership
- Business representative search
- Improve SEO and improve site traffic
- Social media integration
Challenges
- Integrate union-specific software with Kentico for member information update and union representative search function
- Create gateway from general areas of website to members’-only sections
- Build vendor look-up
- Schedule and maintain membership verification with database records
- Create fully responsive site
Solution
Allow members to access members’-only information and to securely update contact
information by registering and logging in to the website. To create custom registration and log-in for union members, BizStream’s developers built a custom web part. The web part lets UFCW members authenticate their membership using first name, last name, member number, and zip code. Developers also created a second option, which allows members to log-in with first name, last name, zip code, and store number. Using a CSV file that’s manually uploaded to Kentico’s media library every night, Kentico compares existing data with new data to keep UFCW 951’s database current.
Vendor look-up. One of the goals of the website is to offer members increased value for their membership. The union offers members several discounts and services. To ensure only members are accessing these discounts and services, vendors can now log-in to the UFCW 951 site and validate members. This feature ties into the existing member database that’s synchronized every night. In the future, vendors can also create their own accounts to promote discounts and services.
Business representative search. A primary reason members seek out the UFCW 951 website is to search for their union representative. BizStream’s team created a custom doc type and custom tables for reps that contain each union representative’s profile and store information. Members can look up reps by employer and store number.
Fully responsive website. Recognizing that much of the union membership visits the 951 website from smart phones and other devices, the labor union knew designing the site to be fully responsive was a
must. Using designs from an outside agency, BizStream’s developers created the site using a responsive grid framework. By adding CSS media queries, the site recognizes different device types and adjusts the grid accordingly. The responsive designs were tested extensively on BrowserStack, a cross browser tool used to test compatibility and to debug the code.
Improve SEO and improve site traffic. Kentico's built-in SEO component allowed BizStream's developers and the union to boost optimization on www.ufcw951.org. Making use of tagging, proper URLs, alt-text, and keyword and meta tag insertion are fast and effective methods to comply with best practices and improve the client's organic search rankings.
Social media integration. Over the last year, UFCW 951 has worked hard to increase its digital presence. BizStream used Kentico’s social media tool to integrate social media with the website. This will help the union further engage with audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube – all of which will lend to promoting the union’s advantages and improving search engine results.
Key criteria for selecting Kentico Xperience
- Easy-to-use content management system with intuitive interface for content administrators
- Affordability
- Responsive design capability
- Ability to quickly update and manage content and navigation in-house and keep website maintenance costs to a minimum
- Social media integration
- Search engine optimization module that
- complies with SEO best practices
- Improved site performance
- Comprehensive feature set