The Challenge
Lumley Insurance is a major insurance company located in Auckland, New Zealand. Lumley products and services are delivered through independent intermediaries and partners who work with a wide range of clients New Zealand wide. The challenge was to develop an attractive, functional and usable web site to be managed by a team of non-technical users on a day-to-day basis. The site design was provided by design agency Maxim.
The following objectives were mandatory:
- Maintain design integrity
- Usable and logical information architecture
- Easily managed user controls housed inside rigid templates for “locked down” content management
- SEO friendly page architecture
- Effortless admin document management
The old site had poor content management as was evident with the inconsistent CSS. The admin users often complained that it was buggy and frustrating to use. This resulted in constant friction between Lumley and their incumbent developer.
The Solution
Netfinity develops data-driven solutions with the user in mind. The term “user” means both admin and public users. Sitefinity is a CMS that truly has the user in mind. Its drag and drop architecture makes content management a breeze. Sitefinity was clearly the solution.
This project was custom-made for Sitefinity. All the mandatory requirements – rigid templates with functional user controls are managed effortlessly. Development was aided by capitalizing on some of Sitefinity’s out-of-the box features and simply extending them as desired such as the RSS feeds functionality for the news ticker at the top of the Home page and the News module. Most of the user controls were developed from the ground up using a combination of JQuery and RadControls with Sifr fancy font rendering.
The module that was most useful was the Images & Documents Library. This was an essential deliverable and is used in every section of the site managing hundreds of insurance PDF documents. Admin users frequently comment on the ease of use and logical click path of the document management module.
The Results
The new site is incomparable to the original. The only time we hear from the client is when a design change is required. They can go about their day-to-day management without worrying about bugs or simple changes to content.
Lumley’s audience is for their network of brokers as much as the general public. For these reasons site traffic increases was not a key deliverable. What is important is that Lumley can manage content day-to-day painlessly. Their new site looks great and functions excellently so users can find the information they need effortlessly.
Overall, Lumley is very pleased with the results and we’re happy to continue to promote the Sitefinity platform as the best choice for corporate web site development and content management.