At Active Northumberland their aim is to work with their partners and communities to develop new innovative ways of delivering services, so they can provide people with the support they need to be more active and lead a healthy lifestyle.

Seeing this as a challenge, Active Northumberland began their transformation process to change attitudes by updating the branding of their centres along with their social media presence. The ‘new look’ is just a small part of their Transformational Strategy, which aims to progressively develop and improve their facilities and services. Along with new branding and social media, a big part of their strategy was the development of a brand new Kentico website.

With our team of Kentico Certified marketers and developers, we welcomed the Active Northumberland project as a sign that all the hard work we put into ensuring we remain Kentico experts and Certified Gold Partners continues to pay off.

The Brief

The main goal for the new Active Northumberland website was to showcase the facilities on offer at the centres through simple and intuitive user journeys which allow both existing members and newcomers to quickly find what they need. There was also an emphasis on creating a great mobile experience, using images and video to showcase activities, as well as delivering a “wow” experience. We were also tasked with integrating the existing solutions for membership, classes and timetables which were previously generated elsewhere.

The Solution

As Kentico Gold Partners with certified marketers and developers we have a wealth of experience developing revolutionary Kentico websites, which put us in good stead for this project. We were able to complete a full project life-cycle from kick-off and design right through to development and testing, all within just five months. (In case you’re not versed in the world of web development, this is out of the ordinary for a project of this size, but we are always up for a challenge!)

We fully integrated both the membership and the classes and timetable data within the existing Northumberland County Council Kentico infrastructure. This included on site deployment handover in line with the Active Northumberland Transformation Strategy. As part of the implementation we used custom reusable widgets and custom connection strings to an external database, as well as a smart search index which allows users to perform faceted search.

The capabilities of the Kentico platform gave us the scope for building the bespoke functionalities we needed to integrate for this project. What’s more, Kentico functionality supports responsive design, which meets the needs of users seamlessly across all devices (mobile, tablet and desktop)

Kentico’s fully customisable .NET CMS solution is intuitive, easy-to-use and packed with a range of integrated tools designed to fulfil all your development and business requirements. Kentico can also be seamlessly integrated with online marketing tools, customer experience management systems and document management programmes to deliver exceptional functionality.

Last but not least, as a Kentico Gold Partner, Spindogs could guarantee the expertise and past experience required to make sure the project was completed within the time frame and went off without a hitch.

Since the launch of the Active Northumberland website, the project has gone on to be recognised within the Kentico community as one of the Top 10 Kentico websites for February 2020. Huge kudos to the team who worked on the project and a big thank you to Active Northumberland for their continued support.