The winner of the first ever Kentico Site of the Year Award is an amazing mix of functionality, usability, beautiful design and bang for your buck, and the fact that the Chicago Zoological Society site topped out both Best Nonprofit Organization Site and Best Graphic Design says a lot for the work of Designkitchen, the group behind it.
It’s very rare that an interactive agency is able to produce work within the typically tight budgets and timeframes that come with Nonprofit Organizations, but even rarer still that the work produced is stunning enough to win design awards.
Laura Maness of Designkitchen puts it down to nothing more than effective platform selection, a proven methodology, a solid team, and sheer determintion.
“Like any site build, balancing the team’s desire to incorporate as many features as possible against the client’s timeline/budget constraints was a challenge, but through careful communication and risk management, along with our proven delivery methodology and a seasoned team, the challenges were overcome.”
“Leveraging an agile project delivery methodology, Designkitchen worked with the CZS/Zoo to prioritize site features for iterative development. The total length of the project was less than 12 months, including a significant brand strategy and positioning effort that ran in parallel.”
Typically technology agnostic, Designkitchen lead each project they undertake with digital strategy, user-centered design, and online brand activation, meaning that an important part of every Designkitchen project is the platform selection process.
For the Chicago Zoological Society, this meant pitting a number of other solutions (primarily Open Source) against Kentico.
“Although several of the Open Source CMS options were free, they would have required a great deal of customization that would have prolonged the development life-cycle and inhibited our ability to execute on the recommended design vision within the allocated budget.”
“Kentico’s low-cost ASP.NET CMS offered the Chicago Zoological a low-cost alternative that enabled Designkitchen to quickly deliver a highly-functional website leveraging out-of-the-box Kentico functionality and fit within the existing infrastructure, and without a doubt, Kentico’s continued growth, evolution and improvement further validates our selection.”
The site has been well-received by the community at large, and the Brookfield Zoo experience (the animals, events, etc.) has shown that it meshes really well with the Chicago Zoological Society’s mission (the science and research behind the Zoo experience), creating a singular online destination that is both appealing and engaging. Easter eggs about the animals and environment planted throughout the site, along with world-class illustrations, add to this already interesting subject matter, and the result is a site that is fun for all types of visitors.
Perhaps more important is that since the site launched, the CZS/Zoo has been provided with the tools to maintain full control and ownership of all of their site content, and Kentico has enabled content to be added and edited with ease. Ongoing measurement of the site’s performance continues to prove ROI and will most likely lead to future enhancement and expansion.
Congratulations to Designkitchen on a great site, an awesome execution, and on winning the inaugral Kentico Site of the Year.
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