“Josh’s vision and customer focus have allowed us to significantly improve our web presence across multiple sites. Ideas born from engaged discussions, continued to an in-depth design, and resulting in a timely delivery give us the flexibility to adapt to our evolving patient needs and competitive landscape. He has become an integral part of our strategic vision, a valued extension of our team, and most importantly, a friend.”
– Frank Drago, Norton Children’s
Norton Children’s
For more than a century, Norton Children’s Hospital and its predecessor hospitals have cared for the children of Kentucky and Southern Indiana without regard to their families’ ability to pay. Norton Children’s Hospital is Kentucky’s only full-service, free-standing pediatric care facility dedicated exclusively to caring for children and is an advocate for the health and well-being of all children. The 300-bed hospital serves as the primary pediatric teaching facility for the University of Louisville School of Medicine.
As the need for expert pediatric care has grown, so has the footprint of Norton Children’s Hospital and the specialized care they provide. The medical facilities currently serve more than 170,000 patients each year.
The Challenge
As the largest children’s hospital in the region, Norton Children’s needed a fun and effective website that helped the marketing team communicate clearly and build a premium experience for parents and kids.
Their Content Management System was a propriety system that did not allow their marketing team to manage their own website and content. They were also locked into a yearly cost just to use this old and bloated CMS. The enormous undertaking of moving to a new CMS was too much for their internal team, so they needed an experienced partner to help them redesign their site and migrate to a better CMS.
My Solution
When I was brought on to lead this project, the C-Level suite asked me to complete this project quickly. Because it was at the end of the fiscal year, they wanted to be able to not renew their old CMS contract, and also wanted to be able to launch the new site at the beginning of the new fiscal year.
I proposed redesigning the website to be a mobile friendly/responsive website that would load very quickly, but still have a beautiful design that would educate visitors well. We landed on migrating to a self-hosted WordPress environment, with a 99.99% uptime website host with a SLA agreement of 5 minute response time. Since server uptime, quick developer response time, and website security were the top priority, I proposed an elegant solution to use WordPress and a world-class host. The current website serves millions of visitors a year, and has had ZERO downtime in 3 years since launch.
I began the redesign process from a blank slate working with the IS department to build a beautiful and fast website.
The Results
The website was designed and developed as a beautiful WordPress website that allows the marketing team to manage the site themselves. This cuts out the proprietary CMS, and allows Norton Children’s to craft pages and content themselves. It has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on CMS licenses, and most of all has helped visitors find information in an effective way. This has led to the over all growth of their digital marketing and continues to convert visitors into patients.
185,000
Patients in 2020
32
Locations
900
Speed Increase