USRowing Redesign

Challenge

USRowing has partnered with BoxCrush for many years, Sitefinity version 3.5 was first implemented for them back in 2010. After 5 successful years on the platform, the decision was made to upgrade to the latest version of Sitefinity.

What makes an upgrade challenging? More than 1700 pages of content, including news, blogs, pages and video along with custom modules and a complex database integration that had been performed by a 3rd party. Not to mention that Sitefinity itself had been fully reenvisioned with version 4.0 and rebuilt from the ground up. The first step in the documented path to update Sitefinity was to upgrade to 3.7. Because of the way the earlier integration had been performed, this proved to be impossible.

Solution

BoxCrush redesigned the USRowing site and then created and built custom Sitefinity templates with the new brand.  BoxCrush then built a custom migration tool to bring over all of the new content and map the fields from the old template design to the redesigned site.

With more than 1700 pages of content to migrate, a comprehensive 301 redirect strategy was necessary to ensure that all of the Google Page Authority was passed on from the old site to the new site and so that users bookmarks and the thousands of inbound links from other websites would continue to function.

The Sitefinity Module Builder was used for the transfer and the rebuilding of custom widgets. The website was also re-integrated with the 3rd party database.  A custom image rotator was created as part of the new design, as well as custom widget templates for existing tools such as the Events and News controls. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook feeds were added to the homepage of the site.  

The Sitefinity Layout Builder and Mobile Module were used to build a responsive design that catered to tablets and smartphones and was still highly customizable by the USRowing team. The client has the full capability to manage layouts and responsive design capabilities without ever touching code.