The problem
A window-furnishing company runs two brands through a network of independent dealers, all on an ageing Kentico 13 platform. They needed a new platform that could give dealers their own spaces with the right permissions, while the existing sites kept generating leads every day.
The approach
Before recommending anything, I compared six platforms against their requirements: Xperience by Kentico, Umbraco, HubSpot, Storyblok, Sanity and Contentful. Dealer-specific permissions, a built-in asset library and connections to their CRM ruled most of them out. Xperience by Kentico met those needs without heavy custom work, so that's what we're building on.
Discovery included workshops with the dealers themselves, which surfaced things a brief wouldn't: city and country dealers want very different positioning, customers often arrive unprepared for the price of a made-to-measure product, and getting quotes into the CRM is a sticking point.
Meanwhile the current sites couldn't stand still. I built a leads API for the business intelligence team, secured with an API key and cached so it can be polled constantly without slowing the site, and designed a richer lead journey (contacted, visited, quoted, won or lost, and why) with every step time-stamped.
The outcome
The rebuild is under way on Xperience by Kentico, and leads have kept flowing throughout. Lead data now reaches Power BI, the live sites are monitored in New Relic, and a 13-page technical documentation suite, checked against the code, has been handed to the client's team.