Content management and marketing app in Kentico MVC

Project goals

The aim of the project was to redevelop the old website using Kentico MVC to improve UX and increase site performance

Result

PJ Our Way application has been integrated with Microsoft Dynamics NAV as well as custom API built on top of it

About the client

The Harold Grinspoon Foundation (HGF) creates opportunities to connect with Judaism and the Jewish community at key life moments. In addition to flagship programs that are active across North America and around the world, the HGF invests in Jewish life at home in Western Massachusetts.

Project goals

Business has set up multiple goals for this project: Update the website look and feel, add interesting and interactive functional features in order to attract more potential users - children 8-12 years old. Improve site performance to allow up to 50K of users and up to 5K simultaneous user sessions during load peak periods. Integrate the application with external ERP platform Microsoft Dynamics NAV and custom API built on top of it. Improve editors/admins experience with management of content and data entities in Kentico admin through custom modules. Another goal from the business was accessibility improvements.

Key challenge

Key challenge was to develop a high performing website with quick response time during load peak time. Another quite interesting challenge was to make the page look and act differently depending on site mode: parent vs. child mode, that could be switched on any page in site header. Also the site awards users with different badges for different types of activity. The challenging part is the awarding logic around those badges.

Our solutions

Using Kentico MVC approach with Web Farm setup allowed us to build a website with a good performance meeting client's performance benchmark, meanwhile full control over the HTML output provides SEO benefits, clean and light markup, faster page load and improved overall site interaction. In addition caching features bring benefits to site performance allowing us to cache whatever we could cache on multiple layers of the system. Also we really like to use custom modules, as they allow us to build whatever data structure we need and provides clean, intuitive and consistent with the entire Admin section user interface.
Probably traditionally for Kentico Experience the most used features by clients are Content Management related modules: Pages, Page types, Media libraries, Content (page) versioning, so we paid a lot of attention to them. For sure Forms; Custom tables and object versioning was utilized. Also we've set up Content staging to make content promotion to production environments as easy as a single click for our clients. To enable site search and crawling we've used Smart search. Key features that were used are: Content caching and Web farms to increase site performance; Custom modules to create custom classes and management interface for different custom entities; Page builder to make better content management experience for content editors.

Result

PJ Our Way application has been integrated with Microsoft Dynamics NAV as well as custom API built on top of it. Traditionally Google Web Analytics has been added to the site to track users' interactions. Also we've integrated the app with EnjoyHint JavaScript plugin to improve new visitors experience with a guided site tour highlighting all site features and capabilities.