Saving companies from complexity and costs

Meeting the sky-high demands of the digital era requires a digital experience platform that allows you to unlock smoother user experiences with long-term ROI. We're hearing that more and more companies are eliminating complexity and costs by moving to Kentico. In this blog, we take a closer look at the City of Canning and how they did just that with the help of Kentico Gold Partner, Dapth. 

Adjusting a MarTech stack to include an alternative digital experience platform (DXP) is a big decision. It requires careful planning and the right support to ensure a smooth transition from one solution to another. However, with the right technology and marketing agency, it can be done quickly and seamlessly.

The City of Canning is just one of the many organizations that have reaped the rewards of a new DXP. With the help of Perth-based digital consultancy and software development agency, Dapth, they moved their website to Kentico. Here’s why…

Located in Perth’s south-eastern suburbs, the City of Canning covers an area of 65km2 and is comprised of 16 suburbs that 93,000 residents call home. The beautiful Canning River snakes its way through the city, its banks providing locals with lovely trails and cycle paths. Canning’s values are rooted in sustainable living, working, and learning and its vision is to make Canning a welcoming and thriving city.

Their previous website, which was running on Sitecore, was not aligned with their vision. Sitecore’s digital experience platform was creating issues, including high costs, difficult content administration, and rigid template design. As a future-focused local council, they needed a more suitable, scalable, and cost-effective solution to help them achieve their vision. So, they decided to have a new website powered by Kentico.

Migrating from Sitecore to Kentico

For the City of Canning, migrating to Kentico just made sense.

Kentico is: 

• Easy to develop: Not only does Kentico provide a much faster time to market, but its capabilities are designed to work seamlessly together, taking away that huge (and ongoing) integration headache that you get with platforms that cobble various solutions together. Kentico’s ease of use makes for much smoother onboarding too.
• Designed with user experience in mind: Like how easy it is to create personalization rules and customize content. And how intuitive to use the widget-based drag-and-drop Page Builder interface that allows users to create their own templates and pages without developer assistance.
• Easily extended: Adding custom functionalities and integrations is much smoother than with Sitecore. And in Kentico, you don’t need to buy and develop your marketing and commerce automation separately as it’s all built-in.
• Known for its service: Kentico comes with market-leading global support and provides documentation, training, and consulting with friendly staff.
• Better value for money: Kentico’s pricing is transparent. It provides everything you need to benefit your business without wasting money on excessive additions. “Sitecore was charging the City of Canning a subscription fee on a user/traffic basis – making it essentially impossible to budget with an eye-watering bill that was only realized once it was too late.” Phil Allen, Founder and Strategist of Dapth

551 webpages and more

The Dapth team started work on the City of Canning’s new website by conducting a series of workshops in order to assess the complaints of their experience with Sitecore and identify their core requirements and objectives as well as their key internal and external users. This in-depth information enabled them to clearly define a strategy that would support the City’s wide range of digital goals.

“Our team mapped out, planned, and developed a comprehensive end-to-end solution built-in line with future trends in a fast-changing world.” Phil Allen, Founder and Strategist of Dapth

A key goal for the project was to collect valuable data and leverage user insights to enable the city to transform its organization into one rooted in data-driven decisions. Analytics helped to understand the kind of users that were engaging with the site and what information or tools they were looking for.

Another crucial requirement was for the City of Canning’s internal team to gain control of the site so they could update it on a daily basis without encountering bottlenecks.

In all, the migration included 551 web pages (and their keywords), 2,085 linked documents, 125 news items, 30 events in full, and 40 dynamic document listing widget instances!

The full project included: 

• A complete website; with smooth user experience and intuitive user interface
• Information architecture advisory and content restructuring
• CMS migration; Sitecore content uploaded onto Kentico ready for launch
• Development of custom features such as events calendar and online document management
• Website hosting and ongoing developer support

How did they do it? 

1. Content workflows and role management – These now help to manage who can publish what to where, and who needs to approve it. No more bottlenecks.
2. Version control – By implementing version control, content administrators are able to roll back to previous versions of content with the click of a button. 
3. Form builder and database – City’s team is now able to build/edit new forms directly within Kentico, with all entries saved to be downloadable or accessible online.
4. Intuitive interface – “Kentico offers one of the most simplistic views of managing the ‘backend’ of a website, with the bonus of user roles controlling who can see (or make changes to) what features.” Phil Allen, Founder and Strategist of Dapth
5. Stable and secure platform – Kentico is highly secure, something that the City of Canning considered essential.

Showcasing a city in all her splendor

The City of Canning’s Kentico website showcases all that the city has to offer. Not only is the City team confident in managing all content themselves, but the website highlights information to its visitors, making it easy for them to find what they are looking for. “We moved their website from Sitecore to Kentico, and in so doing saved them a substantial amount in licensing costs… with the added benefit that they can now manage their solution easily and seamlessly.” Phil Allen, Founder and Strategist of Dapth