Cambridge Healthtech Institute Ektron Case Study

 

 

Abstract

Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) is the preeminent life science network for leading researchers and business experts from top pharmaceutical, biotech and academic organizations. They looked to create a network of Web sites that consistently reflected their brand, increased site stickiness, and made it easy for visitors and customers to find the information they wanted.

Challenge

CHI partnered with Wakefly to build a network of new Web sites that would reinforce their company’s brand, educate their target markets, offer conference advertising and increase advertising ROI. With multiple sites, the messaging needed to be consistent across them, as well as easy to navigate so that site visitors will be able to not only find the information they are looking for, but also take full advantage of everything CHI has to offer.

Solution

Wakefly developed a network of sites with Ektron CMS400.NET, migrating data over from previous proprietary systems to create easily navigable Web sites that maintain a consistent look and feel while still focusing on their specific demographics. The overall effect is a group of sites that visitors use extensively, returning again and again to find and purchase reports, register for conferences and get the latest and most relevant information.

Result

Wakefly took advantage of CMS400.NET’s open API to migrate data from older, proprietary systems to the new network of Web sites, using it to rebuild the Web sites in the new schema. Ektron’s components were very flexible, and made it easy to apply CHI’s new business logic to the templates, making the Web sites interact with users as requested.

Navigation plays a big role in encouraging visitors to spend more time on the sites. With nearly 100,000 articles in their library, CHI’s Web sites take advantage of CMS400.NET’s taxonomy to organize the material, and Wakefly extended Ektron’s search capabilities to include auto-suggestion. The most relevant information is pulled to the top of a search as suggestions, and visitors find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Wakefly also used taxonomy and metadata to display related items (products and articles) through the Web sites. In addition, Wakefly leveraged Ektron’s API to implement a menu whose options dynamically change as articles are assigned at the taxonomy level.

CHI uses Lyris ListManager for its newletter, and Wakefly leveraged the API to give users the ability to subscribe through any of the new sites. In addition, Wakefly enabled Lyris to read an RSS feed of deployed newsletter campaigns and auto-create Ektron content blocks, again using the available APIs. CHI saves a significant amount of time that would have been invested in entering content, while providing a dynamic and ever-changing content environment that increased site stickiness and also provided an increase in their ranking across search engines as a result of the new content.

 

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