The Challenge
With its constantly expanding portfolio, InspirationGate was facing a number of marketing issues trying to keep their website current. Their existing ASP.NET based website, which they built on their own, contained all their terms of service, portfolio and history, however due to the growing business and heavy work schedules, they never had the time to keep the site fresh with new content and case studies.
As the company was always busy, it was required to build a new version of the website on top of a strong content management platform that would facilitate content management and publishing and would serve as the company’s base for its web presence. InspirationGate needed a platform that would allow them to easily change the look and feel of the site and that could be effortlessly enhanced with new modules and controls. In addition, the CMS platform needed to have a strong administration section, with built-in features like URL rewriting, caching, workflow for publishing content and case studies, user management and roles.
“Service companies tend to work around the clock and the lack of flexible content management platform has caused major difficulties in keeping the websites up-to-date” says Amr Elsayed, InspirationGate’s Chief Architect.
Specialized in building web solutions for customers worldwide, the team at InspirationGate realized careful attention needed to be spent on the look and feel, usability and functionality of the new site. Among the challenges of the project were the following:
- Build a creative and professional look for the site, striking a balance between the amount of content and readability.
- Use a strong extensible content management system as a base platform for the site.
- Easily manage and add new content through a workflow approval process.
- Carefully plan SEO, page indexing and marketing strategies by properly laying out site content, using strong analytics tool and properly using different marketing gateways.
- Ensure cross browser support in order to reach as much audience as possible and offer smooth user experience no matter what browser the clients is using.
“As an IT service and consulting company, our website is our image, it is responsible for the initial impression for all potential customers, we knew from the beginning that we needed to create something special and to do that, we needed a CMS platform that gives us full control over the system, content, structure, and data.” says Amr, “Additionally, we were looking to reuse as much as possible from our existing development experience to get the site up and running quickly, Sitefinity covered all of that and more”.
The Solution
InspirationGate researched various content management systems but they were amazed at how Telerik’s Sitefinity provided all needed functionality and more out of the box.
InspirationGate relied on a large array of built-in functionality. The Blogs module for example, after being extended to hold additional attributes, was used to hold all the case studies, portfolio and services. The Generic Content and News modules were used to host all standalone content items, Images & Documents was used to host our ever increasing array of marketing materials, architectural diagrams, prototypes, screenshots, and related.
Yet one of its most powerful features was the strong administration section of Sitefinity. The InspirationGate team added new administration pages, extended existing ones to fit their business needs, added new modules, changed the rendering of existing modules, and found it a breeze to cover all their requirements.
Always looking for rich APIs, InspirationGate needed to support a number of scenarios that involved loading various case studies into a flash movie they built. The case studies were represented as blog posts after being extended to support additional attributes, then new admin pages were added that allowed the user to choose which case studies would show in the flash and finally expose the required info to the flash movie. This was accomplished by Sitefinity’s base UI framework for adding pages and its backend APIs for querying different kinds of business objects.
“Sitefinity uses existing ASP.NET features like Master Pages, Themes, User Controls, Localization and others, coupled with a strong array of technical support, documentation and webinars allowed us to hit the ground running”, says Amr.
The Results
After a 3 month development period and structuring all the content in their proper forms, the new website was finally ready to launch built on top of a strong CMS platform and complemented with a standards compliant, cross browser compatible and search engine enabled website.
Adding and updating site content is now easier than ever, team leads create case studies for each project which are then reviewed and approved by the technical writing team and get published right away.
The new website is much more accessible, new customers can more easily locate us through search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Relying on a combination of caching features through Sitefinity, ASP.NET and IIS, the website is quite fast for the amount of content it hosts.
“As a software development house, our standards are pretty high when it comes to evaluating software packages for our own use and Sitefinity has met every single requirement we were looking for” Amr concludes.