Case study: K12

A Complete Content Management Solution Helps K12 Quickly Scale, Rollout New Business Solutions and Grow Market Share.

The Challenge:

K12 is a technology-based education company providing proprietary curriculum and educational services to students in kindergarten through 12th grade. A leader in the growing online education industry, K12 uses online delivery through virtual public schools to provide children access to a high-quality public school education regardless of their geographic location or socio-economic background. Founded in 2000 and headquartered in Herndon, Va., K12 provides its full range of products and services to virtual public schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia as of the beginning of the 2007-08 school year.

According to Steve Marinetto, VP of Creative Services, "Our old sites were straight HTML and were just not scalable. We knew that in order to grow the company and quickly bring new lines of business online, we needed a content management solution that would be scalable and that could expand as the business expands."

The Siteworx Approach:

While Marinetto had experience working successfully with Siteworx in a former role as a project director at AOL, a major component of Siteworx' selection was the evaluation and recommendation from one of K12's other vendors, 4thought. "Siteworx came in and pitched their CMS approach to 4thought, who quickly gave us the green light. Like us, they were confident that Siteworx understood the scale and depth of our CMS needs," says Marinetto.

To support K12's aggressive growth strategy, Siteworx implemented Axiom cms® to manage its growing inventory of Web properties from a central location. That means that regardless of the look and feel of the site, content owners can publish and update content on the fly without having to rely on K12's development resources.

The Result:

When asked whether the Siteworx solution has reduced K12's costs or improved efficiency, Marinetto was very direct, "With any significant project, your costs are going to be higher at the beginning. But we knew that we were not going to be able to grow our marketing creative and development staff at the same rate that the business expected to grow. It really came down to time and expertise. Siteworx provided us with a complete solution that is already paying significant dividends, allowing us to hit the ground running and quickly scale as we rollout new business solutions and grow our market share. Having content managers handle all of the content updates within the CMS now allows our developers to focus on building out new sites for our growing lines of business. This model is far more efficient."