Work
Crestone
Starting a new conversation in wealth management
Visit SiteCrestone Wealth Management provides wealth advice and portfolio management services to high-net-worth clients and family offices, not-for-profit organisations and financial institutions.
With a presence in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, its commitment to personal service, strategic partnerships, and an 80 year foundation of diverse experience have propelled Crestone to be an industry leader, as they continue to provide an unrivalled level of service.
The Goal
Constantly disappointed with the shiny promises made by large proprietary systems that they were tethered to, Crestone engaged Soul+Wolf to audit and re-evaluate their tech-stack in parallel with their business and marketing goals.
"A can-do attitude! That is what impressed me the first time I met the team from Soul+Wolf, and they didn’t disappoint. From build, to launch & optimisation, they have been an extension of our team and a pleasure to work with. They've always found ways to deliver above my expectations."
Andy Ridings, Head of Marketing - Crestone
The Solution
Working closely with Crestone and understanding their digital goals revealed a large disconnect between their technology requirements and the previously chosen web platform, Sitecore. Soul+Wolf not only audited the underlying technology and its infrastructure, but implemented a solution that appropriately suited the following list of digital goals:
- Cost Effective Web Development, Support & Management.
- Performance issues such Page Speed, Accessibility & Standards Compliance;
- Extensibility, scale & efficiency;
- Vendor Locking & Risk Mitigation.
The most notable disconnect between Sitecore and Crestone's technology requirements was in their respective philosophies towards the creation, adoption, and maintenance of software. As a "closed source" or proprietary system, Sitecore keeps its code locked down which inherently centralises innovation to within its organisation. This in turn either limits the amount of custom integration development possible, or enables it at a very high cost.
The goal of any digital project should always be to minimise risk and apart from the dependencies that this technology inherently carries, there was no reason to stay with the technology, especially in consideration of Crestone's immediate and future functional requirements. As it is so often with projects like this, not one functional requirement explicitly required this technology.
With performance, efficiency and scale at the forefront of our strategy, Soul+Wolf seamlessly migrated Crestone's website to an extensible, robust and well supported open-source MVC framework (and CMS) known as Silverstripe.
Capitalising on this migration, Soul+Wolf then cost-effectively enhanced the website’s usability and overall marketing performance by rolling out various short and long-term functional requirements which included the bespoke development of a series of dynamic blocks to provide Crestone with absolute content freedom.
The Results
- Cost-effectively enhanced the website’s usability and overall marketing performance by rolling out various short and long-term functional requirements;
- Significantly reduced Crestone's development, support and monthly hosting costs with the implementation of optimised and purpose-built project infrastructure;
- Pivoted Crestone's delivery methodology to an agile and decoupled/’Headless’ approach which resulted in many web development efficiencies, including true design flexibility, personalisation, content and data fluidity and enhanced performance (for scale);
- Absolutely no limits.