North Coast Telephone Systems is a local business who supply, install and maintain business phone systems. They’ve have had a website for many years.
The challenge for them was to maintain the website effectively, not because they didn’t have the time or the desire, but because the system their old site was built with wasn’t the right one for their particular needs. Or rather, it may have been fine when it was first built, but they needed something more flexible now!
What they wanted was an online store that wasn’t necessarily an online store!
- A catalogue of products that was easy to maintain and keep up to date was critical, but there was no need for clients to purchase online.
- Information pages were also needed, along with the capacity to highlight their quality brands and products, and
- Rather than the rather impersonal feel the old site had, something more ‘personal’ was needed – I for one, had no idea they’d been here in Lismore for so long (1992), that they covered such a wide region (Coffs, Grafton, Lismore, Tweed and regions in between!) nor that there was such a talented team of 10 who look after everything from sales to service (we’re still working on the team page/s)!
I’ve used WordPress, with a customised premium theme. It’s easy to navigate and easy to maintain. Ultimately, they were very keen to manage literally all aspects of the site which helped guide selection of plugins etc to ensure they were easy to use, except perhaps theme and WP updates. Whilst I did the usual activities to create the site, we used the creation and update of information and product pages as a training exercise, and David (business owner) has taken to it with gusto! Regular training helped keep the turnaround time for site development quite short – around 6 weeks from our first meeting.
Work included:
- WordPress install, theme selection, and subsequent customisation
- Training on how to source, resize, and manage images
- Some photography
- Lightbox images for product pages
- Install and customise plugins including site security, document management, a logo ‘slider’, spell checker, custom tag and category widgets, etc.
- Search optimisation – a work in progress!
- Testing (particularly for product images)
- Ongoing analytics monitoring in the initial site swap around and fine tune SEO
- Identification of relevant sites for cross linking, etc.
- identification of sites where old details need to be updated – this can be a very time consuming business!!
Released: 24 September 2013
Visit the site: ncts.com.au
This is the new site. If you scroll down further you’ll see what the original site looked like.
And, this is the old site.
