The Challenge
De Hofmeesters is a newly formed company, creating innovative landscapes for businesses and government agencies in the Netherlands. With a renowned family name in garden design, they needed a website which would convey their vision and style, from traditional countryside to timeless and modern.
The requirements for the website were two-fold. On the one hand, the website needed to reflect the company's passion for design, expressing in as little words as possible their vision about landscaping. The site should introduce visitors to the services De Hofmeesters provide and offer a preview of some of the amazing landscapes they had designed.
On the other hand, the team at De Hofmeesters wanted to be able to maintain the website themselves. The Content Management System that was to be chosen had to offer an as low as possible learning curve. In addition, the team at De Hofmeesters wanted to be able to add news items and projects in a matter of minutes.
The Solution
De Hofmeesters tasked Logish Premedia with the development of the new website. Logish Media, designed the entire visual brand identity and the website was developed as the main communication channel for first time customers, unfamiliar with De Hofmeesters' brand and services.
Choosing the Content Management System was easy. Sitefinity provided almost everything we needed out of the box. To fully meet De Hofmeesters' requirements, just one custom module had to be developed. It was clear that Sitefinity would let our development team focus on the custom module while the entire website would be built by our front end team.
From a usability and end-user stand point, Sitefinity, again, proved to be our CMS of choice. Sitefinity is so intuitive and easy to work with, that only a few clicks were required in order to add a new project or news item. Sitefinity allowed the team at De Hofmeesters to effortlessly manage the content on their website, without the need of special training or a technical manual.
After the choice was made, we started translating our designs into Master pages, which were then imported to Sitefinity - one of Sitefinity's unique features. It allowed our team to work with VisualStudio and the same .NET technology we're familiar with. Sitefinity's approach to Masterpages, Templates and Pages helped us to separate static content which we developed inside the Masterpages and general content which was added through Sitefinity's template editor. Within a day we had our basic frame up and running in Sitefinity and our front-end developers could start working their magic.
Adding news to the website was a breeze. Utilizing Sitefinity's built-in News module, there was no need for us to build our own custom news application and we could leave it up to our front end designers straight from the start. For showcasing photo material, though, we decided to use a combination of Sitefinity's photo library and our own custom application, which allowed our client to store project information along with the project screenshot. We used the standard application and Highslide zoom functionality. We opted not to integrate this custom application into Sitefinity's database scheme but instead we used our own tables to store the necessary data. Our developers started coding the custom back end module so De Hofmeesters could add projects themselves through the same interface as they could edit content or add news, leaving our client extremely happy.
At no point during front-end design or back-end development did we run into any limitations or did we have to alter the design to fit the Content Management System which is a testimonial to Telerik's robust and flexible Content Management System.
The Results
Sitefinity's user-friendly approach and its ease of development, as mentioned above, combined with a more than reasonable pricing, allowed us to maximize our budget and deliver great results. The De Hofmeesters' website successfully represents their vision and at the same time offers ease of use and flexibility.
De Hofmeesters are enthused about the Sitefinity system and we are already working out ideas to expand the current website to offer visitors even more insight into De Hofmeesters unique approach to landscaping. Since we are yet to fully utilize the numerous built-in capabilities that Sitefinity offers, we are also planning on making use if the out of the box workflow engine and versioning capabilities.
The website has recently launched and De Hofmeesters already started editing content without any problems. After additional content is added a good Search Engine ranking will be just a matter of time. And the first impressions from visitors of the website have been extremely positive.