Velir Studios Wins Sitecore Awards for Best Non-Profit and Best Healthcare Websites

The Brookings Institution and California Healthcare Foundation websites are recognized as Sitecore Site of the Year finalists for North America.

Somerville, MA, January 14, 2009 — Velir Studios, a web development firm and one of the largest Sitecore Partners in North America, announced today that two of its client’s websites have been named Sitecore Site of the Year finalists.

The Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organization, has been named winner of Best Non-Profit Site for 2008, and The California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF), an independent philanthropy committed to improving healthcare, was awarded Best Healthcare Site for 2008 for CalHospitalCompare.org. Selected from more than 1,500 customers, Brookings and the California Healthcare Foundation have been recognized for creating more effective business processes and advancing its online strategies.

“Velir has demonstrated excellence in creating sites that combine creativity in presentation, integration with rich data sources and applications, and offer the ability to educate, inform and motivate site visitors to action,” says Jason Crea, VP, Client and Partner Engagement Sitecore. “We were impressed with the compelling nature of the overall user experience, and we’re thrilled to recognize and congratulate Velir on its achievement for its work with The Brookings Institution and The California Healthcare Foundation.”

Brookings and its design and strategy partner, Threespot Media, selected Velir to engineer and build the Brookings site. The project featured a complex mix of specifications: large content migration requirements; sophisticated taxonomy; site personalization; RSS, video, and audio; third-party application integration for robust site search with the Google Search Appliance; and email newsletters integrating Lyris Listmanager.

But one of the biggest challenges was serving up related content. Velir had to make the system intelligent enough to sort through 10,000+ articles, take a snapshot of each one, rank them, and present the most relevant articles to the user. This process had to be architected to be a near-instant calculation.

Using Sitecore, Brookings has reached its goals, building an easy-to-use and maintain site that provides intuitive access to tens of thousands of articles, all made possible by Sitecore's flexibility and deep support for meta-data and complex taxonomy.

CHCF tapped Velir to build CalHospitalCompare.org, a site that allows healthcare consumers in California to view data by hospital – from mortality rates to patient satisfaction – and choose the best facility for their needs. The challenges for this project centered on organizing and displaying content, while also performing calculations, pulling statistics from a database, and presenting the data in a dynamic way.

By choosing the flexibility of Sitecore CMS as the development platform, Velir was able to merge the content management and data visualization elements. The site also integrates multi-lingual content, dynamic PDF generation, and Web 2.0 features. Site users can now search the hospital database by location, name, or condition and view the results in multiple ways.

“We’re extremely excited and honored to be recognized by Sitecore for our work on these two websites,” says Mark Gregor, President and Founder of Velir. “These awards are a testament to our client’s vision and our development team’s hard work.”

Sitecore’s Site of the Year contest recognizes customers who have leveraged Sitecore’s technology to develop the most outstanding websites. The Sitecore Site of the Year contest is divided into four regions, including International, Denmark, UK, and North America.

About Sitecore

Sitecore’s Web Content Management System (CMS) and focused software solutions enable companies to deliver compelling web experiences. Sitecore’s award-winning CMS software makes it easy for businesses to create and keep up-to-date dynamic, full featured Web sites of all types. Sitecore’s industry leading flexibility and scalability allows companies to better leverage their content to improve customer experience and drive business growth.

Thousands of public and private organizations, including national governments and Fortune 500 companies utilize Sitecore solutions for their web sites. These organizations have created and now manage over 5000 dynamic web sites with Sitecore including Microsoft, IHI, Widex, ISS, Sara Lee, Siemens, Toshiba, Omni Hotels, Computer Associates, WebTrends and Atlanta Falcons.

About Velir

Velir is one of the largest Sitecore partners in North America. Founded in 2000, Velir has established a niche developing large and complex web sites, intranets, extranets, web applications and content management systems for some of the largest non-profit foundations in the United States. Its vision is to bring the best-of-breed technology and a human touch to its clients and the development process in order to build successful websites.

Media Contact

Tiven Weinstock
Velir Studios
617-440-3830
tiven.weinstock@velir.com