The Challenge

LINKS was hired to redesign ABC Corporate Services website which contained a vast array of static pages and had limited capabilities.  LINKS wished to provide the ABC Corporate Services personnel with an effective way to maintain the site’s content through a content management system. In addition, they wanted to integrate the following website components which were to be controlled as structured data:

• Banner Advertisement Management
• Webcast Scheduling
• Hotel Search Functionality
• Subscriber Management

The Solution

LINKS has used Sitefinity for many client projects in the past, all of which yielded positive results. The vast amount of experience LINKS employees have gained when implementing Sitefinity lead us to believe Sitefinity would be an effective means to meeting ABC’s growing needs.

After defining the major functionality and new modules and features, LINKS worked with ABC to create an original artistic design that would achieve their marketing goals and would ensure a great user experience for visitors while navigating through the website.

In order to accommodate ABC Corporate Services unique requirements, LINKS built the following custom Sitefinity modules and capabilities:

• Banner Advertising Module with statistical reporting.
• Subscriber Management Modules added onto existing Sitefinity Administrative capabilities to allow specific access for different levels of service subscribers.
• Hotel Search Engine Module was built to allow users to search from among the tens of thousands of properties within the ABC network.
• Vendor Branding Capability will automatically change the logo and allow specific branding for a specific vendor providing traffic to the site.

The project also included the development of custom Flash elements as page accents to further improve the visual appeal of the website. 

The ABC Corporate Services website was to be hosted on a virtualized Windows 2003 server, hosted by LINKS, and Sitefinity was then configured and installed onto the server along with a Microsoft SQL server database.

The Results

Using the great tools that Sitefinity’s core CMS functionality and built-in modules provide, ABC’s personnel is now able to maintain and update their site content as needed. Thanks to Sitefinity’s extension capabilities, LINKS was able to seamlessly integrate the unique modules needed to accommodate the ABC Corporate Services needs.

In redeveloping ABC’s website, LINKS rewrote every line of code to an up-to-date standard and along with the lightweight Sitefinity CMS, the site loads at least twice as fast compared to its previous version. Both page views and search engine traffic have increased slightly in the first 2 months since launch. Bounce rates have decreased as well. ABC reports that their subscriber base is overjoyed with the changes and increased functionality of the site.