Kenyon & Kenyon

Launch Site

Kenyon & Kenyon is a large law firm based in New York. This was my second law firm website so I had a leg up knowing what to expect. The design would largely remain the same except for a few upgrades in search, sidebar content and location of the searchbar. This site only required me to rebuild the site using Sitecore and import the data which was at the time being managed by Hubbard One. A lot of my time was spent importing data through a custom data importer, I had been developing over several sites, from the existing database. There was a large number of tables and each Hubbard installation has a slightly different naming convention so a lot of time is determining the relationship between tables, creating joins and matching fields up to new templates in Sitecore.

There were also several searches throughout the site which were custom built but one used Coveo as a text search engine. As good as Coveo is at returning the correct results integrating it is one of the most complicated aspects of the build. It runs on the server as a separate application. The layout files reside within the application and the search results are styled through an interface in the application. To include these layouts in your project you need to attach the folder as a Virtual Directory. This negates any ability to build or error check against them. I'm still scratching my head as to why they became a preferred partner.

After all the content was imported I was able to work on the layouts which I spent most of my time. It's really just the sheer number of unique page layouts and trying to build it in a way that reused parts when possible but allowed for the proliferation of a variety of page types. I made thorough use of User Controls which kept the footprint of the project to a minimum. I can be a bit neurotic at times but I take pride when the simplicity of my design supporting a large infrastructure endures.