The Challenge
Colten Care required a complete website redesign to advertise and promote new homes more effectively and emphasize their knowledge and ground breaking specialist facilities. With special focus on the promotion of activities and customer care, Appius were charged with the task of highlighting the truly positive aspects of Colten Care homes.
A proven content management solution with extensive out-of-the-box functionality was vital to enable the rapid creation, deployment and management of an interactive website. Colten Care required the data capture to compile a full and clean list of relevant contacts, potential residents, families and job applicants. A key requirement of the site was to enrich each resident's family experience, providing content and activities information, reinforcing Colten's "how can we help you" concept to drive website visitors and become a recognised authority on advice for care of the elderly. The site also had to reduce ongoing web spend for new content management capabilities and furthermore generate awareness and inquiries through additional web channels and rich content.
The Solution
Sitefinity CMS provided the perfect content management solution – the rich, intuitive browse- based user interface means easy access for all Colten Care staff to upload files, as well as manage content online.
Appius firstly created the concept and key page designs, followed by a full redesign of the website with the new company color palette. Appius’ User Experience specialists created Sitefinity based "wireframes" that led to the build of a full Sitefinity-based site with ease of use and regular update of the content. Appius also implemented Sitefinity workflow, facilitating multiple Colten Care authors and editors to create content concurrently and ensure the content is properly reviewed and approved before being published.
Ongoing pro-active project management and dynamic analytics means that site performance can be constantly measured.
The site required a content overhaul and Appius therefore managed all new content, supplying a Writing Guide to aid the creation and categorization of new content, which included:
- New Homes Information
- General news
- Helpful advice
- Expanded Information pages
- Activities pages
New functionality to capture data via newsletter sign-up and general inquiry forms helped Colten Care generate a clean and relevant mailing list database including the "information preferences" for contacts.
Concentrating on Colten Care's focus on customer and family care, Appius built areas into the site for relatives to view activities taking place in each home. News sections with RSS feed options were also developed, along with social network "sharing", making full use of Sitefinity modules. Appius implemented the Sitefinity polls module on the Colten Care home page together with various website pages utilizing the Sitefinity lists module. For example, the Care Home staff pages now allow Colten Care the ability to easily update staff descriptions across all homes.
Image galleries throughout the entire site have been evolved, ensuring all images are consistent within style guidelines.
Appius built bespoke enhanced Care homes list and Google Mapping functionality to include all homes, as well as bespoke enhanced Recruitment Functionality, demonstrating both the extensible nature of Sitefinity and Appius' ability to deliver exciting and advanced customizations.
Finally, search engine optimisation capabilities were increased, allowing the client to optimise pages with meta data and automatic search-engine friendly URLs.
The Results
The newly launched site has delivered full content management capabilities to Colten for the first time. The Colten team are now empowered to make changes generating a continuous saving where previously they would have incurred ad hoc costs for minor website changes.
The search engine friendliness of Sitefinity and the new site have resulted in no loss of natural search traffic from the site relaunch and a 10% increase in natural search visitors so far. Inquiry levels from the new site have multiplied by 3 times since launch, compared to the equivalent period prior to launch.