| Customer: One of the world’s most influential research and advisory firms | Profile: The client offers actionable intelligence, transformative frameworks, and expert guidance to modernize and elevate sales, marketing, and product performance.
Services: Sitecore Implementation and Support |
| Size: 1,001-5,000 employees |
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| Region: Wilton, CT | |
| Industry: Information Services |
Business Need
The research and advisory firm works with business and technology leaders to drive customer-oriented vision, strategy, and execution that accelerate growth. With research-related information provided through a website, offering a spectacular end-user experience was a core requirement.
The client maintained a corporate site as well as four different event sites for different regions namely US, APAC, Europe, and Canada. However, the client was using two different Content Management Systems (CMS): Sitecore for the corporate site and WordPress for events sites.
Managing content across different CMS and manually integrating data between them was a time-consuming task; whenever any content had to be released, the client had to manually make changes in every WordPress site.
In order to enable standardization, the client wanted all the sites to look similar and wanted the codebase to be the same, so edits could be made easily. The client was, therefore, looking to move all event sites to a common platform, to ease up the content editing and management task.
The client got in touch with Synoptek for moving existing event sites into a common site, to not just streamline the management of content on every site but also provide end-users with a seamless website experience.
Solution and Approach
To overcome the client’s challenge of having a single CMS with the same look and feel across their corporate and event sites, Synoptek proposed a component-based architecture, so components can be re-used anywhere – across web properties.
Given Sitecore’s multi-site feature that allows organizations to have the same code base (ASP .NET MVC) but different content for different sites, Synoptek proposed moving content from their existing WordPress sites into Sitecore. Our Sitecore services included:
- Sitecore implementation
- Integration of existing event sites with .NET MVC
- Sitecore platform upgrade – as and when new releases are launched – to utilize new features and ensure sites are up to date
- Custom tracking of user activity on different sites to understand user behavior
We developed the corporate and event sites for the client – keeping reusability in mind. We proposed capitalizing on Sitecore’s multi-site feature, so the same code base and Sitecore instance can be used for different web properties.
We implemented a component-based Sitecore architecture where every page can be divided into different reusable global components; any component developed for one site can be repurposed for another site – based on the client need.
Since Sitecore runs on a template structure, we helped the client define different reusable global components as well as data for various fields such as title, headline, sub-heading, line text, CTA, and navigation.
We leveraged Sitecore’s Experience Editor to configure content quickly and easily; the Experience Editor is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor using which content like text, graphics, logos, and links, can easily be edited and components can be added/removed.
We defined different templates as well as developed components to arrange content in a way that meets the client’s end-user UI experience. Since the CMS fetches information from the backend as per the design, it displays content in the right manner for the end-user.
Business Results
Synoptek’s long-standing experience and expertise in Sitecore implementation helped in driving the right business results for the client. With our Sitecore implementation, support, and analytics services, the research firm has been able to:
- Consolidate the code base across different corporate and event sites
- Streamline the management of content across different sites
- Reuse components and templates and easily add, delete, and modify content
- Track user activity and optimize aspects of the website to improve end-user experience
- Upgrade to the latest Sitecore version to make the most of new features and capabilities
One of the things that impressed me (and others I’m sure) the most was the performance and stability of the platform throughout the event. Pages were loading quickly and were responsive, despite hundreds (if not thousands) of other users on the network at the same time. I did not experience any timeouts, dead links, excessive loads or anything like that during demoing; the site loaded fast and worked as expected. Not only did everything look super clean, it performed just as well!
– Senior Product Manager
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