The Challenge

Energy Studies Institute (ESI), National University of Singapore located in Singapore is the leading institute for strategic research and a global thought leader in energy. It provides independent, quality and timely policy research and analysis of regional and global energy trends and issues in energy economics, security and the environment. ESI required a well secured website and easy for end user to maintain the web content. There is also a need to reorganize their publications, events and news. The functionality of organizing and searching is crucial for them. ESI also required an Electronic Registration interface for their events where it is required to work as dynamic as possible, and simultaneously organizing the registrants. The research staff are actively updating the website with new logic to access their website to create easy experience for readers to browse its Website. The new logic that they requested ended up utilizing a custom module. Thus, such rapid changes require certain functionality that the developers found a challenge.

The Solution

Magicsoft Asia Systems is a Singapore based IT Solution Provider. We have built up a good image as to develop and deliver quality proven, high-end applications for various industries. The instinctive use of master-pages for templates eases the common rift between designers and developers, letting each focus on what they do best, and the out-of-the-box integration with jQuery and RadControls lets our UI experts build simple, intuitive navigation and user interface elements with minimal effort. Having to work with an intensive content management like ESI required from us to do a thorough research on the best value functionality and level of flexibility. Choosing the CMS for this project was due to its superiority. Sitefinity offered a lot of features that were required by the ESI website, including centralized news and events modules, a fully customizable documents module for recent publications and image gallery, as well as intuitive content management controls. Also, because Sitefinity is so customizable, we were able to build a profile management section to enable the institute to edit and manage their staffs’ biographies from a central source.

We also felt that for an institute such as ESI that is looking to attract potential industries, it was important for the website to receive the level of attention necessary to achieve high page rank in the likes of Google, Bing, and Yahoo among others. As a result, the development team has seen improved user satisfaction, higher page ranks and increased page visits.

The Results

Sitefinity has enabled the website technical team to be quick and responsive to staff requests. The building of web pages can be undertaken in less than half the time previously and course information can be easily integrated with minimal technical involvement. Using this new system enables the staff to ease the managing of the pages, documentation and the intuitive user interface made it an easy system for them to learn quickly. Site visitors can now register for the events conducted by industries or ESI via e-registration means as the events page is regularly updated. Visitors can also refer to old events, publications and news for research and reference materials. Feedback from the staff has been extremely positive, and the utilization of the website for research and event handling purposes has increased significantly. Thus, the technical team is extremely pleased with the ease and flexibility of the Sitefinity platform, and continues to support the platform as a good choice for any potential CMS projects.