Major fix and development for this London-based management consultancy.
Project
The Berkeley Partnership appointed Distinction to carry out a “major fix” on a web site that had previously been developed and gone live in 2007. The original site had been developed in Kentico but, in a number of ways, failed to meet The Berkeley Partnership’s requirements. It was inflexible and difficult to update and maintain, with too much technical knowledge required of the client.
The Berkeley Partnership therefore sought out alternative partners with Kentico experience, putting the project out to a three-way tender. Distinction were appointed because they understood the problems and immediate requirements, and their proposal demonstrated a pragmatic approach to resolving the issues. They presented creative, yet achievable, ideas for how the site could be developed in the future with minimal redevelopment work.
Goals
The project goals were:
- To work with the existing web site to make it more user-friendly for administrators.
- To create a site structure that was more consistent and flexible with more options for future development.
- To ensure that The Berkeley Partnership understood the rationale for the development.
- To help The Berkeley partnership to better understand their website analytics.
Challenges
Because this project was a “major fix” on an existing site, it involved understanding a previous developer’s work, “unpicking it”, and working with the existing programming to make the site more user-friendly. This entailed working with a number of necessary technical constraints to achieve a site which the client would be able to use more easily.
Solutions
The development of The Berkeley Partnership web site took one month. Having helped the client understand their website analytics using real data to justify all our recommendations, Distinction were able to plan and implement changes to the site including:
- Using the portal engine more effectively to give the client better control over page templates and providing comprehensive training .
- Modifying the layout and document templates to accommodate greater flexibility.
- Migrating several areas of the site to use custom document types to make adding new information easy.
- Using document management (workflow and versioning)to give junior staff members the ability to edit the site without the risk of compromising content.
- Modifying the WYSIWYG editor configuration to enable the selection of several different pre-configured styles so that the site can be easily editing without any HTML knowledge.
- The use of different permission sets to require pre-registration of specific content. Existing customers were all added to the site to enable them to access a bespoke support area.
The client was happy to select Kentico because it is:
- Easy to learn how to use – even for beginners;
- Search engine friendly with plenty of flexibility with site content;
- Uses workflow and versioning to manage multiple versions of a document and control who can authorise changes;
- Flexible, allowing the users to create content in a wide variety of ways.
Results
The Berkeley Partnership are very pleased with the site and are able to make much better use of the site now that it is easier to adapt and add to.
This increased capability has enabled them to find more effective ways of using the web site and they continue to work with Distinction on a regular basis. Distinction also now manage their online newsletter.