Cornerstone Taps Progress Sitefinity to Create a Centralized Content Hub

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Industries:
Financial Services
Products:
Sitefinity

Challenge

Cornerstone League had many different web properties, each powered by different technology, which resulted in a disjointed user experience and management woes.

Solution

Sitefinity empowers multisite management, enabling Cornerstone to consolidate content from three different sites to one

Result

Increased page views by 30% and increase pages per session by 18.5% and reduced bounce rate by 10.25%

Full Story

Challenge

The Cornerstone League owned many different web properties with various content and technology behind each of them. As the organization’s list of services grew and unified its branding efforts, managing the technology sprawl became critical. Cornerstone wanted to create a more centralized hub for its online presence, providing users with access to all of its content in one place. This would not only improve navigation and the broader user experience, it would also enable Cornerstone to better showcase the many solutions, services, and values it provides as an association.

Solution

Cornerstone worked with Vanguard Technology to relaunch a new online experience using the MVC framework. The project would combine three websites into one and build a faster, more streamlined experience that still maintained legacy features.

One of Cornerstone’s websites was already built using Progress® Sitefinity®. After looking at the broader content management landscape, Cornerstone decided to leverage Sitefinity for the broader redesign and consolidation project. Cornerstone notes the key differentiators of using Sitefinity have been the ease-of-use, flexibility with changing the layout of pages and easy categorization.

“Sitefinity allows for multi-site functionality. Since many, but not all, of Cornerstone League’s websites were combined into one, the league can continue grow and move other legacy website under one roof and technology,” said Jessica Wood, digital strategy director, Cornerstone League. “Sitefinity offered many out-of-the-box solutions. The new redesign in 2020 updated the brand and create a mobile-friendly website.”

As the Sitefinity implementation got underway, it integrated Cornerstone’s existing infrastructure and tech stack, enabled dynamically generated content, ensured cross-channel data collection, and developed faceted search to enable visitors to find content faster and easier.

Specifically, it created import scripts to move thousands of news articles from each separate website. This resulted in a single website that contains all the dynamic and user-generated content from the previous websites, with a faceted search to find content faster and easier. It also reduced computationally heavy features to improve speed, while maintaining all custom and new functionalities.

As Jessica Wood explains, “In the original website, there were custom forums, redirect, searches, workflow and other functionality. These functions were evaluated and recreated within Sitefinity. For the 2020 website upgrade, these functionalities were re-evaluated again and leaned more on out-of-the-box features and recreated in MVC.”

Once the site was live, it was rolled out to its customers, members and their employees, through an extensive marketing campaign.

Result

The new Cornerstone website was an immediate success with users, with the League exceeding several key goals and metrics, including:
•  9% increase in users and 11% increase in new users
•  9.5% increase in sessions and 2.9% increase in session duration
•  30% increase in pageviews and 18.5% increase in pages per session
•  10.25% reduction in bounce rate

The website redesign project did much to improve the speed and design of the website, while also allowing website administrators the option to use an older framework to maintain their legacy functionality.

“We’ve been able to modernize the look and feel thanks to the layout features we now have access to. The content types have helped us rethink how we deliver content on the website and have made the website more dynamic overall. The content has been much easier to update, and we’ve been able to cross-promote easier using the Sitefinity features. It’s helped us organize the large amount of information that we present,” said Wood.

Next up, the League will launch its new SCMS.coop website and integrate it into its web ecosystem.

About Cornerstone League
Cornerstone League is the nation’s largest regional credit union trade association, serving approximately 450 credit unions in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Cornerstone exists to advance the success of credit unions in the region through legislative and grassroots advocacy; regulatory and compliance support; training, educational, and networking opportunities; essential communications related to news and information affecting the credit union industry; and other products and services that establish Cornerstone as the essential partner for credit unions. For more information, visit cornerstoneleague.coop.

About Vanguard Technology

As your organization grows and evolves, your website should as well. Vanguard Technology has been working with clients to create beautifully designed, impactful websites for that fit their needs and budget for over 20 years.

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