Retail Marketing - Shopping Center Marketing

We have recently partnered with a local technology company and their product, the Agility Content Management System. At first, I was a little apprehensive about working with a CMS because the ones we had worked with in the past were very ridged and unforgiving, causing us to conform our creative vision to the limitations of the tool. The folks at Agility assured me that this was not the case, but I was sceptical, despite the sample Agility sites we looked at where the design was very distinct and not the ‘templatey’ look that you get with most CMSs.

The first Agility site we attempted was the corporate site for a fledgling LCD TV brand called Olevia. We managed the relationship with the client and established the functional requirements for the site. We worked with an agency called Fishtank in California to put together the layouts and graphic designs. These materials were handed off to the Agility implementation team with strict guidelines on how the design was to be implemented. The results were impressive! The Agility templates matched the provided Photoshop files to the pixel and the CMS interface was set up to maximize content management efficiency.

With success on the first project, we decided to dig deeper and see what other boundaries we could push. Working with global businesses, we often build sites that need representation in multiple countries. The next test was to see how Agility handles content management with multiple languages. The XFX Force site was a perfect test – a global video card brand with a web presence in North America, Brazil, Japan, the UK, Poland, Germany, Spain and Russia. I’m sure that this is one of the most complex sites running on the platform, but their implementation team made the build look easy and we were especially impressed with the efficiency of translating content to the multiple languages and importing it into the system. Again, the designs were matched to the pixel and the extensive content management requirements were configured in a way that even the least technical member of their staff is able to update content.

As a third test, we decided to try our hand at completing the implementation in house. We worked with the Agility team to establish the Agility configuration specifications for the site, and had our developer attend a training session to learn how to get the most from the Agility Framework. Using the ASP.Net based framework, we were able to integrate the content management capabilities with the site, once again benefitting from the flexibility of the CMS which allowed us to implement the templates to our exact design specifications while accommodating the management of different content types.

Overall, we are very impressed with the power of the Agility CMS. Having unlimited design flexibility was something we only dreamed of before we found Agility. Also, with the support of their implementation team, we feel confident in pitching the system to even the most demanding clients because we know they have our back if things get tough. I would recommend having a look at this product for highly creative and sophisticated websites and smaller, simpler corporate sites alike.