Secure, reliable and feature packed
NTI, a leading Australian specialist insurance company, worked with us to consolidate the websites for their specialist insurance lines into one centralised location using the feature-packed Kentico CMS.
The site's capability has also been recognised by Kentico and placed as a finalist in the Kentico Site of the Year awards under the Industrial Manufacturing category.
The client
With over 45 years of experience in the insurance industry, NTI are Australia’s leading transport and logistics specialists.
Through their brands – NTI, National Transport Insurance, Yellow Cover, Truck Assist and Marine Protect – they offer premium specialist insurance and assistance products designed to protect Australian businesses and families.
Their combination of tailored products, experienced people, accredited repair and recovery networks, and industry advocacy have seen them ranked as Australia’s number one specialist insurer.
The objective
The overall objective of this project was to bring NTI’s product lines, all of which have their own separate websites, under one umbrella site that encapsulated all their products plus NTI’s brand portfolio.
NTI's new site had to allow for the migration of content from the individual sites and the smooth integration of various widgets, forms and social media accounts, with potential for further integrations in the future.
The various brands housed on the umbrella site would share a uniform layout and use the same features and widgets; in order to create a more consistent experience for users across multiple brands and give NTI the flexibility to introduce additional brands and products in the future with little effort.
This umbrella site also had to allow access for NTI’s marketing staff to enter and edit their own content without any complications, so they could continue to update the site in the same manner they were used to with the individual branded websites.
The challenge
The most significant challenge in consolidating content, widgets and forms from multiple sites into a one-stop shop was that the individual brand sites were not all built on the same platform. While the use of Kentico was common to all of the sites, some were built with Kentico Portal Engine and some were built with Kentico MVC.
With support set to end for the Portal Engine platform by 2023, and with the more scalable MVC platform becoming the industry standard, it was imperative that the new site be built on an MVC platform.
It was also essential that the site structure clearly reflect the differences between NTI’s brands, so similar products could be grouped together and users wouldn’t end up browsing for marine insurance when they were actually looking to purchase protection for their truck.
Due to the nature of the umbrella site, outage windows were also a concern. Under the previous arrangement, for example, a problem on the National Transport Insurance website wouldn’t have affected the Yellow Cover website – but consolidating all the brands on the one site meant that a problem with www.nti.com.au could take all of the brands out of action at the same time.
The solution
By building with Kentico Xperience, Kentico’s flagship CMS and digital experience platform at the time work commenced on the umbrella site, Zeroseven was able to deliver a solution that met all of the project’s objectives while also having responsive design across mobile devices and desktops.
Kentico Xperience’s new and improved MVC features, including the form builder and the visual page builder, allowed developers to recreate all of the widgets, APIs and forms that needed to be ported over from the older Portal Engine-based sites without losing any functionality.
A simple colour-coded system was used to structure the site and delineate between the brands, with related products grouped together under colours – Black, Green, Yellow, Orange and Blue – already associated with those brands by their customers.
Concerns over putting all of NTI’s eggs in the one digital basket, so to speak, were assuaged by Kentico’s dedicated 24/7 support. Ultimately, of course, maintaining one Kentico site – as opposed to maintaining separate sites for each brand – offers significant advantages in terms of licensing fees, upgrades and patches.
Once the older sites have been decommissioned – a gradual process from one brand to the next that will require campaigns to inform customers of the transition – the NTI marketing team, who are already familiar with Kentico, will only need to sign into one simple and streamlined CMS to add and update content.