The Challenge

The existing TopGolf website consisted of a multitude of static pages and was no longer meeting the growing business needs of the company. Links Technology Solutions were tasked to enable TopGolf’s personnel to maintain the site’s content via a content management system, which could be accessed through their six worldwide locations and which would allow TopGolf’s international teams to independently manage their marketing efforts. Another requirement was to incorporate social networking outlets for TopGolf clients. In addition, the new website was to allow the following website components to be implemented as structured data:

• News Article Management
• Social Media Features
• Calendar of Events across multiple locations
• Photo Galleries/ Rich Media Capability/ Press Libraries
• Location Sensitive Weather Display

The Solution

LINKS chose to utilize Sitefinity for the TopGolf site based on the successful experiences they’ve had with this product in the past. The consistencies of these experiences have enabled LINKS employees to continually back the use of Sitefinity for many of their client projects.

TopGolf operates from six locations worldwide and the website was required to be as “local” as possible. Thanks to Sitefinity’s out-of-the-box multi-language support, LINKS provided for this localization and ensured that modules and pages are context sensitive to each location.

The Sitefinity built-in-modules provided great functionality for the TopGolf site.  In order to accommodate unique requirements, LINKS built the following custom modules:

• Custom Events Calendar
• TopGolf Current Weather Conditions
• Social Networking outlets to sources such as Facebook and Twitter
• Custom Media Gallery

The project also included the development of custom Flash elements that are dynamically driven and visually highlight TopGolf’s services. The TopGolf website is hosted on a virtualized Windows 2003 server. Microsoft SQL Server was selected as the back end database.

The Results

Sitefinity’s core CMS functionality and built-in-modules have been highly effective in revolutionizing TopGolf’s website.  The implementation of Sitefinity provided TopGolf’s personnel with an efficient way to build out and further maintain their website.  Thanks to Sitefinity’s extensible architecture for building custom modules, LINKS was able to create custom modules and integrate them seamlessly into the Sitefinity-based solution. This was critical to the success of this project.

TopGolf’s site has performed at increasing speeds over the time since its launch. LINKS instituted some optimization techniques to further speed up page load and the retrieval of data. Visitor traffic has dramatically increased since the sites inception due partly to large marketing efforts by Topgolf and also the site’s ability to score well on search engines in a market specific context. Referring sites have increased by double due to marketing efforts. Time on the site has remained consistently high due mainly to the ability of the site to provide accurate and current information to qualified visitors. The CMS allows the client this freedom to continually update the site and keep it current.