North Hennepin Community College

North Hennepin Community College (NHCC) was excited to migrate their existing content to Sitecore CMS, to develop a number of new web applications and to add their first intranet site utilizing Microsoft SharePoint.

Unfortunately, the initial selected agency partner was not a good fit and all deliverables fell short of expectations.

The development was not done correctly and the necessary training for internal staff was not executed well.

NHCC was left with a “new” website that was not meeting the needs of their audience and it was cumbersome for their staff to update.

The NHCC team decided to scratch the “new” website that was developed by the previous Sitecore partner and searched for a new Sitecore partner to help them implement the refreshed website.

NHCC wanted to plan their upgrades to not only to keep up with the technology that is desired and expected by the various audiences, but to increase enrollment by making the flow and navigation more enticing and easier to follow on the website. 

Nishtech was chosen as the new agency partner of record and created a 3-fold approach to solve the issues.

A new site was needed in a short time frame to meet NHCC’s immediate needs.

The new site was to be developed and implemented to have updated features and better functionality throughout the site. 

The content needed to be refreshed so that all visitors would recognize the new and fresh, consistent, and organized pages with additional features such as automated navigation and breadcrumbs. 

Additionally, Nishtech integrated the online web calendar software called Trumba which improved and created easy to manage components for the staff to update while integrating elements to their existing, stand-alone, .NET application, the Employee Directory.

By utilizing the existing Sitecore content management system, NHCC's content authors now have a better, more intuitive architecture which aids in page creation, editing page content, and adding custom forms.

The NHCC team is excited to have added:

• A more appealing, interactive design that makes it easier for users to navigate the site and consume all of its content.
• Enhanced navigation with dropdowns creating user friendly movement throughout the site.
• Improved content and content management system tools, creating a better experience for content authors and content editors.
• A new dynamic display for program sheets to help potential and current students learn more about what NHCC has to offer.
• A custom tool developed by Nishtech that migrated content from their old Sitecore CMS platform to new templates
  • This migration tool strips out old styling within the content, so when migrated over to the new system the new styling will be picked up from the new website’s style sheet.
  • The custom migration tool migrated thousands of pages from the old CMS system to the new refreshed Sitecore CMS system.

What started out as a poor experience became an attention-grabbing, fluidly executed and easily managed website.