Sitecore Recognizes Sitecore Site of the Year for North America

Network of Wedding Planning Destination Sites Increases Web Traffic With Sitecore CMS Software

San Francisco, January 20, 2010 – Sitecore, the leading provider of .NET Web Content Management System (CMS) software, today announced that The Knot Inc., a leading lifestage media company devoted to weddings, nesting, and first-time pregnancy, has been named the North American Sitecore Site of the Year.

There are multiple sites within The Knot community, including theknot.com, thenest.com, thebump.com and weddingchannel.com, all powered by Sitecore. Without increasing its IT staff, The Knot has built and launched 220 niche sites under the weddings.com domain. This network of niche wedding planning destinations has added as much as 20 percent more visits to local traffic on TheKnot.com in a given month.

Sitecore’s Site of the Year contest recognizes organizations that have leveraged Sitecore’s technology to develop an outstanding Web presence. Sitecore’s partners and customers submitted nominations on their use of Sitecore’s CMS to deliver more effective business processes and advance their online strategies. The Sitecore judges considered creativity, integration with rich data sources and applications, ability to educate, motivate an action and the overall user experience.

The previous CMS The Knot was using was not scalable, with one site taking more than one week to build. According to Miles Stiverson, Site Director for The Knot, “With Sitecore, we can build several sites per day. In addition, our old CMS had inflexible templates, and we had difficulty optimizing for search. With Sitecore, we have more control over our URLs and can more quickly react to trending in the industry.”

Working with Sitecore partner, Hedgehog Development, Sitecore was selected for its .NET technology platform, extremely flexible and scalable solution and ability to support future content needs. Dave Walters, VP of Technology Solutions for The Knot added, “We continue to expand our reach in our markets using Sitecore, adding more sites to our implementation. We have been happy with our ability to design an information architecture that allows us maximum reuse of content across these brands. Most importantly, we are impressed by Sitecore's ability to support the increasing site traffic.”

Hedgehog Managing Partner Dan Galvez added, “We are thrilled to see The Knot win this award, and proud that we could be of help to them in selecting the best platform and developing their solutions. Their sites dramatically demonstrate the depth and breadth of what’s possible with the Sitecore platform.”

In addition to the Sitecore Site of the Year North America overall winner, the category winners are:

Best Consumer Goods Site
Thule
Partner: Hanson Dodge Creative

Best Ecommerce Site – TIE
Green Mountain Coffee
Partner: Competitive Computing - C2

Best Ecommerce Site – TIE
Dierbergs
Partner: Aware Web Solutions

Best Education Site
Colorado Technical University
Partner: non~linear creations

Best Financial Services Site
ADP
Partner: BGT Partners

Best Healthcare Site
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Best Legal Site
Lawyers.com
Partner: The Revere Group

Best Non-Profit Site
OneDrop
Partner: Ergonet and Sid Lee

Best Sports/Entertainment Site
Daytona International Speedway
Partner: Digitaria

Best Travel Site
Mt. Hood Meadows
Partner: ISITE Design

The Sitecore Site of the Year contest is divided into four regions: International, Denmark, UK, and North America.

Source: Sitecore