Challenges
Prior to working with High Monkey, the Sitecore environment at KCTCS had grown “organically” without any consistency or planning. As a result, there was no consistency among the multiple KCTCS campus websites in their architecture, site construction, page layouts and content, use of images, naming conventions, and more. This created both a site management challenge and a supportablity challenge for the KCTCS web and technical teams.
Services Required
Search and Content Strategy
UX and DX Design
Website Design and Build
Solution
High Monkey’s work with KCTCS included a complete re-architecting of the Sitecore CMS environment for the KCTCS main college site. The High Monkey team conducted extensive requirements gathering and stakeholder interviews that lead to the definition and creation of re-usable templates, content renderings, page layouts, page sub-layouts for use across all KCTCS websites. High Monkey then applied the new common architecture to 2 campus location sites and provided extensive knowledge transfer for the web team at KCTCS to enable them to convert the remaining 14 college location sites to the new Sitecore CMS architecture.
High Monkey also worked closely with the KCTCS team in the implementation of a separate mobile interface to provide a more user-centric mobile experience, Additional consulting work from High Monkey included the development of a .NET tool to map content fields from KCTCS’ existing database schema into the re-architected database structure and providing custom .NET programming for a navigation control and a “news and events” control. Finally, the High Monkey team provided extensive search customization by created several controls using the Lucene search engine (open source search engine included with Sitecore) that included an advance search engine to filter on content categories and dates, and display templates for custom search results.