CREDIT UNION TIMES

Vol. 16, No. 24 Weekly Independent Report On Credit Unions June 15, 2005

Special Report: Data Processing & Technology

Do-It-Yourself Web Site Updating Takes Hold
at Centris, Via Digital Insight
By MARC RAPPORT
CU Times Technology Correspondent
OMAHA, Neb. – One of the big guns in
Internet banking has launched a new ser-
vice that hands the keys to the digital
dashboard over to the clients, and Tim
Mogler says that makes his job easier.
Mogler is the Internet marketing spe-
cialist at $314 million Centris Federal
Credit Union in Omaha, Neb., one of two
credit unions that beta tested Digital
Insight’s new Web Center and went live
with the platform in mid-March.
Web Center allows credit union staffers
to edit and update content on their Web
site and post the changes live, instead of
having it done by the vendor.
“It’s made my job easier just because
managing the Web site is now so much
quicker and we can do so much more.
There’s no lag time in submitting pages
and having them load it for us,” Mogler
says.
Mogler says the 10-branch, 58,500-
member credit union already has been
using the system to improve its communi-
cation with members through its Web site
at www.centrisfcu.org.
“We can schedule when we want to post
new rates, for instance,” he says. “Last
Friday, I put new rates in and then had
them post on Monday. That’s one example.
We can also put Amber Alerts on our site
or let our members know, say, when an
ATM is back in service at one of our
branches.”
The Web Center content tools offer a
Microsoft Word-like WYSIWYG (what you
see is what you get) editing interface, and
the system overall is designed to be used by
people without deep knowledge of the
HTML (hypertext markup
language) code that’s actu-
ally driving the changes,
says Will Detterman, senior
product manager at Digital
Insight in Calabasas, Calif.
Mogler notes that some
HTML knowledge helps
flatten the learning curve
for using Web Center. “I found it to be fair-
ly easy to learn,” he says, “but it might not
be so easy for people not used to HTML and
other things like that. But it’s really very
intuitive and I would think they could pick
it up very fast.”
The Web Center plat-
form takes the credit
union staffer making
the changes through
several steps, such as
work and preview areas,
before they are posted
through the DI servers.
The new system also
offers expanded report-
ing functions such as
session and page usage,
search engine and
browser stats, and click-
stream analysis,
Detterman says.
“Click-stream analy-
sis helps you know
where people are run-
ning into problems with
your Web page. For
instance, maybe
PDF files are too big
and taking too long
to download and you
can see people are
abandoning them,”
the DI product man-
ager says.
Web Center also offers a rollback fea-
ture that allows a credit union to retrieve
exactly what was on the site at a given
point in the past, useful for both disaster
recovery and audit requests, Detterman
says. Audit logs
also keep track
of all adminis-
trative func-
tions performed
at the site.
Mogler at
Centris says,
“A nice thing
about it is that if I had to, I could go to a PC
anywhere else and be able to access the
site, which is kind of a nice disaster recov-
ery option to have.”
Mogler says being a beta site for Web
Center had its benefits, too.
“We probably got as much or more as
anyone will from this,” he says. “We got to
help with the design of a lot of things and
give our input in a lot of other ways. It was
interesting, too, because a lot of this was
really new to everybody.”
Indeed, developing a product that sim-
plifies matters for its customers was a com-
plex process for DI, Detterman says.
“We combined back-end server mainte-
nance kinds of things with basic hardware
control and security tools, along with con-
tent management tools,” he says. “Some of
it was third party, such as the WYSIWYG
content editor, but we did all the integra-
tion work ourselves.”
Digital Insight (www.digitalinsight.com)
provides Internet banking services to about
1,400 financial services organizations,
about half of them credit unions.
– mrapport@sc.rr.com

1 Credit Union Times, June 15, 2005 www.cutimes.com

Reprinted with the permission of Credit Union Times