Greenstone was launching the new OneChoice brand to provide simple life insurance to the people of New Zealand. To achieve aggressive site performance targets, they wanted a CMS that would let them separate the content repository from the front-end website to minimize page load times. They chose Kontent.ai because of the flexibility it offers in letting them choose their own technology stack and because of its ability to deliver content via API without additional overhead. The end result is a high-performing website that introduces the new OneChoice products to prospective customers and will scale as needed when the business grows.
OneChoice is a new brand under Greenstone Financial Services that offers simple life insurance solutions to the people of New Zealand. As part of launching this new brand, the Greenstone team needed to build a website that would help reach new customers with product details and legal information while letting site visitors request insurance quotes or a call from a OneChoice agent. Many of the other Greenstone brands had websites that were built on a traditional content management system. While this system offered many benefits, they wanted their new website to utilize a more modern CMS that would promote better site performance and the flexibility to choose whichever development languages they prefer.
As this was an entirely new brand, the OneChoice team knew their architecture would have to allow them to scale easily as the business grows. Previous experience had taught them there is a direct correlation between site performance and their ability to attract online leads, so keeping the site as light-weight and fast as possible would be of critical importance as well. The new site would also need to offer an exceptional experience across any modern browser or device, as they expected a significant portion of their traffic to come from mobile visitors.
The development team frequently helped make basic changes to page layouts and the configuration of components on their other websites. If they could find a solution to empower their Brand and Content teams to manage the pages of the new website within the CMS, this would free the developers to focus more of their time on strategic initiatives.
Finally, once the new website was up and running, the team hoped to be able to migrate other Greenstone brand websites to this new platform so they could benefit from these same performance and flexibility improvements.
The OneChoice team selected Kontent.ai to manage their content because, as a modular content platform, it’s able to operate independent of the front-end site and allow them to optimize the performance and user experience in a way that’s not possible with traditional content management systems. All content on the site comes from the CMS, while website lead forms and requests for information submit visitor data into an internal database via a separate business API.
The site was developed using ASP.NET MVC in C# with an architecture that makes one API call per page in order to optimize performance by minimizing server-side requests. On the front-end, other measures were taken to minimize load times by keeping page sizes below certain thresholds using image compression, minification, and similar techniques.
The content model includes a hierarchy of content types that are configured to create web pages by combining “blocks” and “widgets” that make up the various page elements. The order of these elements within Kontent.ai determines the order that they appear on the page, enabling pages to be constructed and updated quickly by less technical users.
With the launch of the OneChoice brand, the people of New Zealand are fortunate to have a simple solution to life insurance. The new website has been instrumental to their success by delivering reliable information on products and related topics with blazing fast page load times. According to real-user-monitoring metrics tracked by the team, their pages are now loading 3 seconds faster than their similar non-Kontent.ai websites they’ve built in the past. Creating and updating web pages is faster as well due to the configurable content model they’ve developed.
While the launching of a new brand involves many initiatives spread across various parts of the business, the new website has proven to be a key aspect of the OneChoice success. This has been recognized throughout the company, with stakeholders from the CEO to developers now inspired to migrate as many of the existing Greenstone websites to this new platform as soon as possible.
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