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Wessex Group
"HigherSites offered us a trouble free route to effective website management and I would have no hesitation in recommending their services."
Rob Nikos
Group Sales & Marketing Executive
Wessex Group are building installation and maintenance company in Dorset. HigherSites have been their long serving web team, so in 2009 when they approached us to create the 3rd version of their corporate website, we were both excited and had very strong ideas of what it was needed.
Greater control of content
The previous version of the group site was created in 2002 when there was less advances in technology than now, and the requirements of the group were relatively small. This had meant that the content for the site was provided at the time of launch, and aside from the news, nothing else regularly got updated.
This was the first thing we decided to address in initial meetings, and it was decided that the marketing team would take full responsibility for the day to day running of the websites content, provided it was easy to manage!
The Relaunch
The 2009 relaunch of the Wessex Group website now features complete content management throughout. This allows the update of not just the news section of the site, but also all services pages, allowing the team to add, edit and remove information as they please. Most importantly however is the Case Study section that allows complete control over the upload and showcase of new projects the group have undertaken.
Saving money, and the environment
Previously, a fair amount of the marketing budget had been spent on the production of brochures and similar materials which, given how often the content needed to change proved to be something of a concern for the company long term. We considered that a solution could potentially be found in using the web.
The first, and simplest option was to offer the current edition of the group brochure available as a download directly from the website. This meant that the in-house marketing team design and produce regular updates to it, export as a PDF file and load onto the site as latest iteration for download. An obvious saving in print costs.
We then decided to take it that next step further by ensuring all services and case study pages within the site had a design seperate from the layout of the site itself. This would then mean it would be possible to print off selected pages and prepare them within a printed cover only, as inserts. This also meant specific case studies could be tailored to the requirements of the person requesting the brochure.
Communicating with customers
The other main area we wanted to improve on was the communication with customers via the web. Previously it had been possible to submit an enquiry through the site, but that was more or less the limit of the interaction. So we generated share buttons on all content allowing any visitor to the site to post a link to an article or useful piece of information published on the Wessex website through their Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.
We also developed a fully content managed email newsletter facility that would allow Wessex to send out mass emails to their huge database of customers as frequently as they wished. These emails can also be easily divided up between trade customers, domestic and internal.
For more information on The Wessex Group and to see our work visit www.wessex.org