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Kimball Hospitality

Kimball Hospitality is the leader in hospitality casegoods. Trusted by the most prominent brands in the industry, Kimball brings a best-in-class product and an all-inclusive experience to designers, buyers, and owners. Kimball specializes in casegoods and seating projects, and the recent acquisition of D’Style, a powerhouse in the public space sector, significantly expands its capability as a full facility provider. Kimball provides services that allow them to be a “concierge” to those who partner with them, making the company the “go-to” for hospitality projects. Kimball specializes in design consultation, product engineering, and project management, on-time shipments and installation support.

Kimball Hospitality devices mock-up
Technologies
.NET Core / MVC, Azure, Azure Cognitive Search, Kontent.ai
Services
Content Management System, Design, Development, Integration
Industry
Furniture, Hospitality
Live Site
kimballhospitality.com

Results

Kimball Hospitality needed help to develop a re-designed website in the Kontent.ai platform. Since its launch, Kimball Hospitality has seen an increase in monthly visitors and an uptick in requests for quotes due to the information it can now provide on its new website.

 
0 %
Increase in Monthly Visitors
Kimball Hospitality home page
Kimball Hospitality phone and tablet device mock-up

Ultimately, we have had a very good experience with Kontent.ai. As people who were not experienced with the system, we were able to pick up on it and adapt fairly quickly. BizStream was a pertinent asset to getting our website up quickly and efficiently.  They adapted to our requests and changes very quickly, and we are very pleased with the ease and quickness that both solutions provide to our business. This has been a game changer for us. Our website looks and functions beautifully.

Adria Henke
Brand Manager

Challenges

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Design

  • Refresh the design to align with Kimball International's global brands, including National Office Furniture, while adhering to Kimball Hospitality's unique branding.
  • Kimball wanted its website to be seen as a leader in the industry, doing so through high-quality product galleries, accessories pages, and product showcases.
  • Kimball wanted to bring more attention to their seating product line, highlight their unique furniture customization ability, and showcase designers and design inspiration.
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Search

  • All content needed to be highly searchable.​
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Solution Architecture

  • Implement a new site utilizing a more robust content management solution that correctly showcased what the Kimball Hospitality brand was capable of as a market leader in the space.
  • Implement a site that is easier to manage, allowing for content entry to be managed in a single location when dynamically shared in multiple locations on the site.
  • Develop a site that will continue to grow with the needs of Kimball Hospitality, specifically future integration of Kimball data and ERP information with the website.
  • Eliminate server infrastructure worries (including CMS upgrades, security, patching, and upgrades).
  • Kimball needed an easier way to manage content. For example, allowing for one change to propagate over the entire site.
  • Kimball IT desired a reusable framework that could be used for future projects and additional sites.
  • There was a need to solve the best organizational structure for the site that could handle relationships between different products and groups by collection, brands, materials, etc.
  • Creating a dynamic routing solution for building a website that shows content.
  • Kimball wanted to balance page performance with the need for a large number of high-quality images and ensure a positive mobile experience.
  • Creating a dynamic routing solution for building a website that shows content.
  • Mobile responsiveness was essential as most users visit the site via iPad and mobile devices.
  • Kimball wanted to share content on social platforms with high-quality images easily.
  • Creating the Find a Representative feature utilizing the newest technologies instead of a standard on-premise database.
Kimball Hospitality phone device mock-up

Solutions

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Development

  • Azure DevOps CI was used to automate releases.
  • BizStream used custom development tools to help speed up the development process.
  • BizStream implemented the indexer as an ASP.NET Core Hosted Service to create long-running operations, such as updating search.
  • Kontent.ai Web Hooks were used in multiple ways for updating the site when new content items are published and for helping the search index know when there are new items that need indexing.
  • BizStream utilized the Kontent.ai Model Generator tool from the product community team.
  • Our team wrote our own custom Azure Search indexer to create long-running operations, making all content searchable.
  • We utilized the Website Preview feature of Kontent.ai (direct preview link to content), allowing editors to edit instantly.
  • To solve the relationship challenges, our development team used linked items as an asset component part.
  • The Kontent.ai URL Slugs feature was used for routing, allowing Kimball to customize for SEO.
  • BizStream implemented custom code to power metadata on the site to add in Open Graph tags.
  • Working together with Kimball’s marketing team, BizStream was able to leverage content types and elements to create a very structured content model.
  • Because of the rich content model BizStream developed, we could easily display specifications, related products, image galleries, and more on the front-end of the website.
  • ASP.Net Core MVC was used to create the main web channel .NET core 3.1
  • BizStream used Azure to scale, increase performance, speed up deployments, and reduce IT labor.
  • Kimball IT leveraged the Kontent.ai Management API to handle bulk imports of product images and content items, reducing content entry time.
  • Kontent.ai Roles and Permissions were used to manage security for landing pages - content types.
  • The Kontent.ai feature of Content Elements Restrictions was used to ensure admins had the proper specs for content to ensure high-quality images were being put out.
  • A Kontent.ai Custom Element was used for Kimball’s “Find a Rep” feature based on Country and State.
  • Implemented custom error handling so admins could have a pleasant user experience when things weren’t going right.
  • Leveraged Azure App Services for multiple environments and ease of deployment.
  • BizStream heavily utilized the Kontent.ai asset management feature to set Kimball up with a digital asset management system complete with structured folders for structured content. This allowed the Kimball team to navigate and reuse pictures, assets, and downloads easily and to help store their products, brands, resources, and more. Distributed over a Content delivery network (CDN), making for an extremely fast download.
  • BizStream used a modern serverless architecture for the overall solution, including a Headless CMS (Kontent.ai), Azure PasS Resources hosting .Net Core MVC projects, and Azure Search to accomplish the new KimballHospitality.com site.
Kimball Hospitality phone and tablet device mock-up

Kontent.ai Features and Tools

  • Kentico.ai Delivery SDK for .Net
  • Kentico.ai Content Management API
  • Custom Elements
  • Content Snippets
  • Web Hooks
  • Preview URLs
  • Preview URLs
  • Workflows
  • Roles
  • Content Model Generator

Other Tools Used

  • Google reCAPTCHA V3
  • Google Tag Manager / Google Analytics
  • Azure Application Insights
  • Azure Search
  • Azure PaaS
  • Azure DevOps
  • SendGrid API for email transactions
Kimball Hospitality Tables screenshot

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