FERNO

FERNO is the global leader in pre-hospital emergency care solutions, creating integrated products that maximize the delivery of care while elevating safety for caregivers and patients. The family-owned company based in Midwestern USA serves emergency services, fire rescue, mortuary, industrial safety, police, and the United States military in more than 100 countries around the world.

FERNO’s web presence was split across six existing websites. The company wanted to bring them all together into one global site, Ferno.com – a website originally built in Kentico. This would enable them to fold all FERNO Group companies, strategic partner companies, and their international location-based websites into a more seamless web experience for their global brand.

They also wanted to address performance issues, enable the website to be used as a sales tool, and empower their teams to more easily manage and update content.

FERNO chose Kentico based on the company’s previous experience with the platform, its rich feature set, ability to be hosted in Microsoft Azure, ease of use for technical and non-technical users alike, and robust marketing functionalities. 

The teams agreed that the first phase of the project would focus on modernizing the design, improving user experience, enhancing page details, supporting high-resolution images, collecting analytics, and improving SEO, among other things.

Challenges

BizStream was tasked with merging five Sitecore sites into an updated Kentico site with MVC architecture and shutting off the old Sitecore installation.

Due to the way the original FERNO site had been developed, getting it to function correctly for reuse using best practices for MVC was a significant undertaking. The team had to thoroughly assess the installation, reviewing all application and infrastructure components and configurations.

Additionally, FERNO's original site had been developed to load the entire site upon visiting, making the website extremely slow, so the implementation team needed to rework the entire architecture to address 404-page functionality, lack of domain modeling, improper settings, and non-reusable models and controllers.

Solution

With this project FERNO achieved its goals on multiple levels:

• Highly configurable pages thanks to MVC framework
• Global site content managed with built-in translation
• Pages app and content tree enable multiple regional sites to share some content and have their own unique parts
• Improved administration interface
• User roles and permissions set up for security
• 404 pages are customized and URL routing is updated for best practices
• 301 redirects are managed in an external configuration file for ease of administration
• E-commerce functionality serves as a foundation for integration with Stripe for commerce transactions
• Sales team connects with customers via HubSpot integration
• The site integrates with SharpSpring and Zoho CRM, Azure, and Google Analytics / GTM

Results

Now that FERNO has its entire web presence powered by Kentico, it can provide a seamless web experience for its visitors, customers and partners. The FERNO team can now easily update and manage content on their website and have been surprised by how well the site now serves as an up-to-date sales tool.

Within the first month after launch, the website experienced 75% increase in new visitors. The bounce rate is down significantly, and there has been a substantial lift in qualified sales leads. 

Ferno.com was named Site of the Year 2019 in the Business Services category.