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National Heritage Academies

National Heritage Academies (NHA) is a network of 85+ public charter schools serving more than 58,000 students in 9 states in the USA. NHA is the 4th largest for-profit education network in the USA.

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Technologies
Azure, Kentico Xperience, Xperience MVC
Services
Content Management System, Development, Digital Marketing, Integration
Industry
Education, Management
Awards

Kentico Xperience Site of the Month

Live Site
nhaschools.com

Results

NHA needed assistance replacing its existing website, powered by legacy technologies, with an easy-to-use CMS that would allow many editors to make changes quickly and efficiently from the corporate office and multiple individual school administrations without needing technical expertise.

0 %
Increase in Session Duration
0 %
Increase in Organic Search Conversion Rate
0 %
Decrease in Time Taken to Complete Student Application Form
0 %
Increase in New Users
National Heritage Academies Home page screenshot
National Heritage Academies phone and tablet device mock-up

Like any large-scale project, there were challenges. This project was unique in that it required integration with numerous systems and technologies. BizStream and National Heritage Academies were able to tackle those challenges boldly, and Kentico handled our complex solution very well. Managing content on our sites has vastly improved, and mass edits and content validation has been streamlined due to our implementation of Kentico as our CMS.

BizStream provided a wealth of knowledge throughout the entire development and change management process. Because of the way National Heritage Academies chooses to do business, many teams and individuals are required to know how to use Kentico. BizStream was able to successfully deliver a feature-rich product and also provided us with insight into how to use Kentico. From a development standpoint, BizStream was willing and open to discussing their process and melding it with our own. This allowed us to share technical knowledge throughout the project lifecycle.

Alex Schelhaas
Digital Marketing Manager

Challenges

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Solution Architecture

  • Allowing content on the site to be managed by admins within the corporate office as well as content admins from the 85+ NHA schools.
  • Giving NHA the ability to quickly create new sites for new schools as the organization grows.
  • Providing a way for global content to be intermixed with school-specific content to allow content like school-specific blog posts to be pushed up to the corporate site and mixed with corporate content.
  • NHA needed the site to be hosted in the cloud, so on-premise resources, connectivity, and scalability wouldn’t become an issue in the future.
  • Ensuring the site loaded as quickly and efficiently as possible.
  • Ensuring unique (language) specific URLs could be used.
  • Providing a way for site visitors to easily find schools closest to their geographical location.
  • Supporting state-specific legal requirements for educational institution websites.
  • Handling many complex custom third-party integrations.
  • Assuring multiple development teams can work in cohesion.
  • Delivering a way to host 85+ individual school sites plus the corporate site, with unique content per site all in one website.
  • Providing multilingual support for both English and Spanish cultures.
  • Ensuring WCAG 2.0 AA compliance for website accessibility.
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Solutions

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Development

  • BizStream custom developed more than a dozen different page components in the Kentico Xperience MVC development method that provided the NHA’s marketing teams the ability to easily create more than 1,000 variances of a page. The marketing team can choose from various design components to build pages allowing them to easily mix and match design elements and lay out a highly stylized page without additional developer effort.
  • BizStream measured the site’s performance, stability, scalability, reliability, and speed under various workloads by utilizing Apache JMeter, Visual Studio, and Kentico.Glimpse (a debugging tool for Kentico Xperience MVC).
  • NHA utilizes the Siteimprove Accessibility Checker to evaluate the site for accessibility issues in real-time.
  • The BizStream development team created custom code to integrate with software such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, YouTube, Vimeo, and LiveChat.
  • The new site utilizes Azure cloud technologies, including an Azure SQL database, Azure App Services (PaaS), and Azure Application Insights, to meet performance and scalability requirements.
  • BizStream leveraged the existing Kentico Portal Engine tools, modified for MVC, to add Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for better visibility within search engines and mobile.
  • BizStream utilized Compare for Kentico to make environment synchronization simple and precise.
National Heritage Academies phone and tablet device mock-up

Key Criteria for Choosing Kentico

  • Easy to use content management system with an intuitive interface for content authors.
  • Localization and support for multiple languages.
  • ASP.NET MVC Support
  • On-line Forms
  • Heavy API usage
  • Cloud-based Azure hosting
  • Cloud-based Azure external storage
  • Responsive design
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