Warner Norcross and Judd

Having seven Michigan offices and more than 200 attorneys, WNJ is the largest law firm in its region — but the original focus on client service remains. To help clients get to know the attorneys working on their cases as well as understand the law better, the firm's Kentico website showcases comprehensive attorney profiles, areas of expertise, and information regarding the law.

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A Kentico Case Study

Client Needs

Provide new platform with familiar interface for content editors
Develop new back end of website, while leaving front end design unchanged
Build flexible system to display attorney profile pages with 50+ attributes that are one of many choices of a specific set of information (foreign key)
Improve internal website search feature and search engine rankings for profiles using different categories and methods
Migrate large amount of SQL data
Improve URL structure and content layout to increase search engine rankings

Solutions

With WNJ's WebCenter based in SQL Server - just as it is in Kentico -- BizStream created migration scripts to efficiently move data. Developers at BizStream dynamically created more than 20 custom document types, 25 custom tables, 30 page templates, a multitude of custom macros, and a few custom web parts to migrate four years’ worth of data.

For the project, the BizStream team built a 1:1 replication of the old CMS version of WNJ's site as well as the new Kentico version of the site.

To connect website users with appropriate attorneys, there were a few special needs for the site. One of those needs is having attorney vcards that supported multiple versions of the vcard standard. To do that, BizStream created a custom web part to handle the rendering of attorney profile data in vcard format.

Website Achievements

Editing Made Easy. With this website conversion editors of the site now enjoy doing their job. Previous to the conversion it was a hassle to edit web pages with the older, outdated CMS. Editors absolutely love how easy it is now to manage each section of the site within Kentico.
SEO Improvements. More importantly to the business owners, however, is the fact that the SEO improvements that Kentico gives them have really come to fruition. WNJ is now consistently turning up in search results for keywords that they never used to before.

Key Criteria for Selecting Kentico CMS

WNJ chose Kentico CMS over other CMS packages because of how flexible the solution is, how much functionality came out of the box, and how robust and scalable the CMS is for the price point that Kentico CMS comes in at. Not only was the initial investment very reasonable, but the support and maintenance cost is now saving them over 300% compared to what support and maintenance cost with their previous CMS.

Another important reason that Kentico CMs was chosen is that the Kentico platform sets WNJ up for future goals. Right now they do not have a single point of maintaining their web presence. With Kentico the next step will be to migrate all of the external blogs and newsletters back inside Kentico. This will save the content editors time and hassle by only having to login to one spot to manage everything.

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