The Berrys website was last developed in 2006, or maybe early 2007. This was just before the whole web 2.0 thing really kicked off, and we thought we were being pretty modern using CSS instead of nested tables for layout... At the time, it was pretty impressive - fast loading, clean layout, some RSS feeds, a dynamic asp.net news function, and LOADS of content. All that content did ok on google, for a fair while, and we did ok on search engine optimisation. But, as Christian Payne recently pointed out, compared to today's sites, we may as well have pinned a bunch of business cards to the wall and hoped people would read them.
In the early part of 2009, i decided to redevelop our web site, but with zero budget, and skills limited to a bit of html and (very) basic php, I had no idea where to start. I knew i wanted it to be dynamic, but I didn't know how. We also had the issue of our estate agency part of the business - so we had to list our properties online. I didn't know how to set up a site that could handle property listings, other than using dreamweaver to edit a page in the old-school fashion. I didn't think it would be appropriate for our agency administrator to learn html just to upload our properties to the web, so something else had to be found. Various off-the-shelf estate agency packages were available, but either rubbish, expensive, or blatantly US-oriented. I also looked at full-blown CMS packages, but they were either way too cumbersome, or expensive (again), or lacked support. Then I came across WordPress. I'd heard of people using it for business sites before, but was a bit wary of using a blogging platform for our business site. Still, I tried it out on a test install and it seemed to do a pretty good job.
By now, it was January 2010 (a lot had happened in the mean time, and I'm very busy and important). I needed to get a crack on, so i started working from home for 3 or 4 days a week. I started off by working out how to manage the structure of the site - what categories I'd use, whether I'd use pages or posts for various content, and of course, the estate agency section. I didn't want our agency staff to have to do to much replicated work, so wanted the process of getting a property online to be as automated as possible. While digging around in the dashboard, I realised that Wordpress can accept email blog posts, and that gave me an idea. We use SharePoint to manage our property lists internally, and a number of staff have permissions to add properties to it. I could get SharePoint to execute a workflow when a new property is added, which sends an email to the WordPress site, containing lookups from the property list, such as name, address, location, price, etc! Awesome.
It took a while to set up properly, and there are still a few things I'd like to improve (SharePoint workflows out of the box, can't have more than one lookup in the subject line, or attach images or attachments from the list item). The workflow does a good job though, and sends a few other emails to various people when a new property is uploaded, to make sure someone logs in to check the post and publish it, and line managers are aware it's gone live. The property section is split into commercial, residential, agricultural and developments. Getting a decision on the different categories was somewhat more difficult than you'd expect...
We now have a Berrys people section too, where visitors can find out more about each member of staff - the idea being that our business is solely about people and relationships, and potential clients should feel they can engage with us easily. Each person has their own page, with a bit of history, a photo, and links to other social networks such as twitter and LinkedIn (check mine out - Tom Geraghty). I'm also encouraging our staff to start some blogs, and we have a news category for the more announcement-style news, rather than the more opinion-based blog articles.
The design is based on a theme called Arras, with a lot of changes and adjustments. That theme was used so we could have a scrolling front page image listing our various services to clients. It works well as a concept, displaying our services without the need to have a long and boring list. We've also got some handy little social media buttons on the right hand side of the pages, enabling our users to share posts on the main social networks.
There's actually still a lot of work to do, such as fixing some of the issues resulting from the site being hosted on IIS, and various little formatting tweaks that will undoubtedly take just as long as the design of the site in the first instance. The design has a few changes to be made, I'm looking at plugins to help with redirecting 404 errors from the old site links, still trying to get content from various people in the company, and I'm still looking at ways to speed it up as well. In the mean time, we're hoping that google starts to re-index the site properly, and quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment