Project Description
Project Brief
HMG Strategy provides networking, thought leadership, innovation, and transformation to drive the success and career ascent of IT leaders nationwide. HMG hosts CIO and CISO Summits, provides partnership opportunities, and publishes resources for the IT professional (such as white papers, articles, press releases, and videos).
They enlisted Stormhold Digital because their content management system (CMS) was not meeting business needs.
They were using a custom-developed proprietary CMS solution which lacked current functionalities.
Because features and functionality were added over time, there were inconsistencies throughout the platform. HMG was not getting everything they needed from their CMS, nor would they be able to; as time wore on, it became increasingly difficult for business users to use.
The company stakeholders ran into the problem of having to go through contracted IT personnel to make changes to about 70-80% of the website.
Additionally, the HMG website publishes a lot of content, and there was not a good flow for Users; pieces of content were disconnected, Company and Employee data were not linked in their database, and great pieces of content were overlooked.
Their old website was not mobile responsive either; it was a static site that did not look nice on mobile devices.
HMG needed a new CMS that would fit their needs, and enlisted Stormhold to implement a solution.
Views of the Old Site
After Sitefinity CMS Implementation
Approach
Stormhold was excited to modernize the HMG site and make it easier for business users and website visitors to use.
For this project, we determined that Sitefinity CMS was the best solution for HMG’s needs as a mid-size enterprise looking for a mobile responsive website that would accommodate the needs of their marketing department and other contributors.
Export Data
To migrate from their old custom-built CMS, we encountered that much of the data and content was not easily exportable. Much of the content (articles, white papers, photos) needed to be manually exported (copy and paste).
It was important to move from the old CMS system because as they added more info, the inevitable migration to a more-dynamic CMS would become more and more difficult; they were digging a deeper hole.
Additionally, images needed to be updated and brought up to current web standards. Headshots, article photos, photos from events, all needed to be redone with images at different sizes and resolutions. Quite the undertaking for a website of this size!
Now, any content can be easily exported.
Improved Content Organization
HMG produces a lot of content, but it was difficult to find. There wasn’t a clear path to get to certain types of content, and as a result, great articles weren’t getting the traffic they could. Stormhold’s Sitefinity implementation improved the way HMG’s content is organized on their website.
We created a homepage where very specific forms of content are organized categorically, consolidated their content feed, and clarified ambiguities in old naming conventions.
Additionally, as visitors click through the site it will show more specific results based on categories and tags the visitor was browsing.
Before implementing Sitefinity, their data was scattered and disorganized. After adding data like tags, categories, and custom data fields, HMG’s content is connected in a big web where content, articles, videos, company data and employees are all linked.
Video Content
Video content has become some of the most effective in the digital marketing world today. HMG used to upload their videos to Vimeo and embed into their site; Sitefinity CMS can host video, giving HMG increased control over analytics, access permissions, easy for authors to upload to site directly.
Improved SEO
We improved the website’s SEO and within the first month, saw the website traffic increase by 40%! We began improving their SEO by answering questions like: what kind of content is this; where do you want to show it; how do you want to tag it in a way that users will understand?
Content is now displayed with fresh news pieces on the homepage where search engines and users are able to find it.
Stormhold organically improved optimization in adding relevant data fields for business uses to put in alternate text and metadata. The site structure and adherence to modern code (latest code standards) makes a big difference. The Sitefinity solution allows makes it easy to adhere to best practices.
Capabilities Employed
Beautiful Design
HMG Strategy’s old website was not mobile friendly, business users were unable to make changes easily, and the structure of their great content was not easy for users. Those issues were resolved.
Additionally, Stormhold likes logos to always be well integrated with the website. For HMG we used the colors from the logo to create themes around it throughout the site.
- Blue: Events
- Purple: Resource Center
- Green: News
- Orange: Signing Up to Join Network
Excellent Results
HMG Strategy’s old website was not mobile friendly, business users were unable to make changes easily, and the structure of their great content was not easy for users. Those issues were resolved and the website was rolled out on time. We got good initial feedback and made some changes following the rollout to improve.
Since the site has been live, HMG has experienced:
- Performance enhancements and optimization
- Easily visualized Sitefinity analytics and Google Analytics viewed within the CMS
- Previously, there weren’t analytics in the back end. Our client only had Google Analytics before; the reports were huge and difficult to understand
- Improved traffic by 40% daily
- Particularly, mobile traffic rose significantly, whereas before it was almost nonexistent.
- Content creation tracked easily in Sitefinity Dashboard
- Low bounce rate; average visitor session lasts about five minutes which is great.
- Business users are happy with the solution