B2B Site with Extended Functionality
Background
Emergency Planning Solutions Ltd (EPS) is a Belfast based contingency planning consultancy and training provider. Until 2009 they had an old fashioned website that was produced on a tight budget in the early days of the company by a local web developer. As the company and its reputation grew their paper based marketing material and corporate identity developed and was excellent, but their website was letting them down - portraying a small start-up rather than the leading consultancy that the company had become.
Requirements
EPS needed a new professional web presence. Additionally they wanted to publish industry news and white papers, run a calendar of upcoming training events, accept course bookings online and ease the administrative burden of handling bookings.
The new website should fit with the existing company logo and corporate identity, emphasize their affiliations and certifications and present a friendly image rather than that of an anonymous corporation.
Solution
Olive Net used a leading and powerful CMS, Joomla, to implement the EPS site. This CMS is more complex than that used for the Olive Net site, but allowed the addition of the extra course / calendar functions without expensive custom software development and offered greater flexibility for future expansion.
The site templates, ie. the look of the site, were developed using a combination of design flair and the existing corporate identity. EPS were also quite specific about the images to be used on their front page. The templates were custom developed and this was the most time consuming part of the development.
Additional modules were purchased from the Joomla extensions catalog to provide the course calendar and booking functionality and these were then customized by Olive Net where necessary.
A news feed was added to the front of the EPS site giving a constantly changing and updated front page, but without any administrative effort.
Results - Before and After
A simple before and after of EPS online presence is almost evidence enough of a great success. Simply putting yourself in the position of a potential customer gaining an impression of the business from the website should convince you that a corporate website of this standard is highly desirable or even essential, and it is not expensive to achieve, despite what some web development companies might tell you.
Cost
A CMS portal similar to EPS would cost between £4000 and £7000 depending on the complexity of the design and extended functionality required.
Sequence of Events - EPS
Timings here are approximate and it should be noted that the EPS site development was not urgent and many decisions were delayed by EPS directors' availability. The timeline though should give an idea of the sequence of events and a no-rush development time.
Week One
- Discussion of requirements by telephone and email and a rough costing given (upper and lower limits based on complexity).
- Olive Net study existing website and prepare presentation showing suggestions, options and an explanation of the likely future CMS which would run the new site. Pricing options prepared.
Week Two
- Olive Net fly to Belfast for face-to-face
- Presentation given
- Design discussion and formal agreement of requirements, costs and deliverables
Week Three
- Prototype screenshots of new site prepared and agreed
- Template preparation of new CMS begins
Weeks Five to Eight
- Site online as test system
- Training EPS to use CMS admin panel and publish content
- Discussion of design, particularly images, and changing where necessary
- EPS add content (articles, introduction, about us etc) with help from Olive Net
- Olive Net complete work on additional functionality such as course booking
- EPS obtain better images, eg. portrait photos of directors
- Test, test, test
- Site live