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Case Studies

  • How Sitefinity Solved Gold Coast Conventions and Exhibitions Centre CMS Issues

    • Our clients love the usability and friendliness of managing the Sitefinity CMS. It’s great to work with a product that both the end users and the developers love.

      Author: Matt Cooper Company: isntmedia

    • Client: Gold Coast Conventions and Exhibitions Centre
    • Industury: Events
    • Project website: http://www.gccec.com.au
    • Implemented by: Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre
    • Industry: Events
    • Background: The Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre (GCCEC) is Australia’s largest regional convention centre. The centre continues to be one of the most advanced venues in the country offering flexible space and maximum light coupled with advanced technological infrastructure and award winning service.
    • Challenge: To design and develop a sophisticated, technologically advanced portal that positioned the Gold Coast Convention & Exhibition Centre ahead of its competitors. Utilising smart site architecture and cutting-edge search optimisation, we sought to significantly increase site visibility and visitation, thus boosting market share and positioning the GCCEC as the undisputed market leader online.
    • Why Sitefinity: The client wanted to have a content approval process and content versioning and was on a tight deadline to have the project completed. Sitefinity comes with these features out of the box and allows for rapid development.
    • Technical Details: The new GCCEC website took 3 months to build (including dedicated scoping, design, development and testing phases), and required the full time services of 2 developers. The site was developed in ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server, AJAX, Flash and Sitefinity CMS.
    • Results: The new enhanced site launched on the 12th of October 2009 and within just 2 weeks had achieved exceptional traffic growth of 285%. This site reflects our latest thinking regarding SEO and consumer engagement!
  • Download PDF (151 KB)

  • The Challenge

    The CMS architecture had to be flexible enough to cater for GCCEC’s specific development requirements and allow for extended module functionality, a good example of this is the Flash carousel/slideshow on the home page that is driven by data in the CMS to showcase events and other key pages.
    “Sitefinity’s easily customisable and extendable framework allowed us to use our own proven company architecture and code standards and seamlessly plug them into the Sitefinity Framework. This enabled us to do whatever we wanted and saved us many man hours.”
    Mark Arrowsmith – Project Team Lead / Architect

    The Solution

    The technical objective was to produce an online web experience that was easy to use, engaging and informative, designed to inspire consumers to interact with the site to achieve a desired outcome. Whether that be to submit a quote request, book tickets to an event, request more information or simply find out where to eat or stay during your time on the gold coast.
    The use of a Flash carousel/slideshow on the home page had to be dynamically driven from the CMS database. We wrote a Sitefinity module that produced a dynamic XML document that the Flash file could call containing the data for both the changing background images as well as the individual items.  In addition we had a public module on the home page that stores the settings for the Flash file.  
    Using Sitefinity’s advanced URL rewriting capabilities allowed us to give every page a SEO friendly name and also allowed the use of dynamic event (e.g. concerts, exhibitions & conferences etc) URL’s to maximise organic search engine results for those terms.
     “Our clients love the usability and friendliness of managing the Sitefinity CMS. It’s great to work with a product that both the end users and the developers love.”
    Matt Cooper– Project Manager

    The Results

    “The client is very happy. The Sitefinity CMS has allowed them to create a website that looks great but one that they can update easily.”
    Sarah Fewtrell – Account Manager
    From a SEO and site traffic point of view the results speak for themselves after just 2 weeks:
    • Overall Traffic is up 285%.
    • Page views are up +567%
    • Bounce rates dropped -49%
    • Time on site increased by 7%
    • Organic Search Engine traffic increased 880%
    • Key words driving traffic has increased by 732%.
    That’s almost 3x more visitors; viewing 5.5x more pages, increasing stickiness to the site when landing there and spending more time on the new great looking site in just 2 weeks!

     

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