The Challenge
Unique Employment Agency - part of the staffing company USG People - is a specialist in the recruitment and selection of permanent and temporary staff in secondary and college/university levels. Unique takes a personal approach, providing staffing solutions within key priorities for SMEs. Unique’s key activities include broadcasting, secondment and recruitment. Unique has over 100 branches throughout the Netherlands.
After more than forty years in recruitment, the company was expanding its services considerably. In addition to its quarterly magazine, Unique wanted to develop a platform so they could support companies in their efforts to develop their businesses and get the best from their employees. One of the USG People requirements was that the platform would be developed using Progress Sitefinity CMS.
Further, every visitor—regardless screen size—must have a superior user experience while browsing articles. That meant the website needed to be responsive and contain forward-thinking functionality.
The publishing date for its magazine was about a month away, so there was some pressure to develop the platform in time.
Progress partner SWAT had the expertise needed to build this ambitious platform.
The Solution
A responsive website would ensure every visitor a quality experience, to that was pursued. Also, to draw more attention to the newsletter subscription area, SWAT used one of the finest techniques around the web called Parallax. The Parallax effect is when something looks to be in a different position when viewed along different sightlines. SWAT turned this feature off for mobile devices to optimize the website speed .
To ensure the menu was always in reach, the header was positioned at the top. For an even smoother website display, and for those browsers that support it, SWAT used the CSS property position:sticky.
The shop also built a custom field to quickly and easily select images from a library while editing blog posts. The field fetches the images asynchronously and caches them temporarily to optimize performance.
Content editors can easily manage the custom module “Authors” in the Sitefinity backend. The Author has a name, image, summary, biography and link to his/her website or blog. Through another custom field, the content editor can choose an Author while editing a blog post.
To generate more traffic to the Unique main website, SWAT built a custom module called “Unique thoughts.” The content editor can create some Unique thoughts in the backend that will be randomly displayed by a MVC widget, which can be dropped almost everywhere in the website.
The most important MVC widget is the Blog post overview widget. This widget displays, based on the current page URL, the right blog posts. The content editor is able to configure this widget while editing a page. For example it’s possible to specify how many articles are preloaded and how many articles must be fetched when the visitor clicks on the “read more” button.
Almost everything in the front-end can be managed in the backend of Sitefinity. To realize this, SWAT used the Sitefinity API, standard and custom modules and Sitefinity Thunder to create MVC Widgets that display the content, such as blog posts, search results, unique thoughts, popular articles, etc.
The Results
Customer Feedback
The quarterly magazine, the website peoplebusiness.nl and biweekly newsletters offer entrepreneurs inspiration, knowledge and information at any time of the day. The friendly interface is easy for even the most novice users. To create a blog this fast in our eyes demonstrates top performance! With Sitefinity, we reduce the effort, time and eliminate frustrations. Thanks SWAT and Progress Sitefinity!
Developer Feedback
Thanks to the standard functionality Progress Sitefinity provides, and the ease of creating custom widgets and modules, we were able to create this amazing website within a month. By making use of Sitefinity Thunder, we saved at least two or three hours per MVC widget and provided at the same time high end customizability to the end user.
We can proudly say that the website was a Progress Sitefinity CMS Top 5 Website of the Month November 2013, and this project helped propel us to receive an award for Mobile Friendly Sites.
PARTNER PROFILE
SWAT is an experienced advertising and web agency based in Heemskerk, Netherlands. Its team consists of a mix of young talents and experienced professionals. In nine years, SWAT has developed into a specialist in the field of design, internet and application services. Besides large multinationals, SWAT also serves local enterprises and ventures.