Our Approach

Understanding

We believe that meticulous planning is the key to building world beating websites. We spend time listening to you to establish you exact needs and requirements. Our experienced consultants are experts at ensuring your business or organisation gets the best out of the Internet.

An essential aspect of our ethos is that we pride ourselves on giving value for money. We always ensure that you end up with the most creative and cost effective web based solution possible. To do this we listen to your needs, vision and budget requirements and create a system that fits you perfectly.

Innovation

Once you have agreed a system specification, we move on to the creative phase. Our talented in house design team will talk to you about the branding; the look, feel and design requirements for your site and produce a range of exquisite designs for your consideration. Our creative director has overseen the creation of many world-class websites including, most recently the EDF intranet and Networking in Education sites.

Our objective is to find a solution that is unique and exciting. An Internet presence that differentiates you and puts you ahead of your competitors. Our designs are memorable, designs that stick in your customers’ minds. All this within a framework that ensures the site remains fast, accessible and a joy to use. We pay close attention to your existing brand identity and visual style, to ensure that customers can see that your company talks with one voice across all forms of media.

At the same time, our technical team are creating the infrastructure of your site. Writing the code that enables your site to fit your individual specifications, whether that is a content management system, data base, intranet, extranet, ecommerce requirements from catalogues to the management of online shopping outlets. Our amazing technologists have a huge variety of skills to draw on. Including our own exclusive .net content management system, amazing Flash skills and extensive experience delivering robust systems to international organisations.

Realisation

All Ecru Internet solutions are subject to a tight project plan. We manage all the different aspects of design and implementation to ensure that our systems are delivered within agreed time frames. This can include anything from compiling and maintaining a detailed timing plan of development work, through to co-ordinating the efforts of team members from your own company and from other outside suppliers. Where possible, we aim to become a single point of contact for our customers, giving them more time to run their business.

We will also construct a capable infrastructure on which to host your site. We can advise and arrange suitable website hosting. The right hosting is essential and who and what to choose depend on your needs and the needs of your website. We can ensure that you have the best solution within your budget. If you are serious about using the Internet to support your business, it is often not enough to host it with one of the 'cheaper' hosting offerings. You need to ensure that the site is monitored 24 hours a day, ensuring it remains fast, reliable and secure, no matter what level of traffic it is receiving. We will advise you on an appropriate hosting solution to manage this, to ensure that your company is always open for business online.

Promotion

An effective web site is not just about design. We assign equal if not greater importance to the promotion of your site. A clever, creative and engaging site will only be effective if it receives a steady flow of customers and in particular, customers in your target audience.

Building significant levels of traffic from search engines can be a slow and painstaking process, as many search engines can take several months to list your site. However, it is an important step, and one that will bring high volumes of highly targeted visitors in the long term. We will work with you to determine the keywords that your customers are likely to use, and help to ensure that you get good positioning in the search engines using those keywords.

It is also important to note that there are many more ways of promoting your site other than search engines, and we will help you choose the most appropriate ways. Where these involve cost, we will help you manage this, and ensure that you are getting a good return on your investment.

Whenever we launch an Intranet site or business tool, we ensure that promotion is an integrated part of the launch plan. Raising recognition of the site among employees and communicating the benefits to their day-to-day working life is vital to ensuring its successful adoption as a business tool.

Adaptation

Finally, we monitor the ongoing performance of your site. We look at the levels of traffic you are achieving, where your visitors come from, and where appropriate, how many of these turn into solid leads for the company.

We then use this information to tune the design and the message contained in the web site, and the way in which the web site is promoted. Adaptation is the key to survival and companies that are good at adapting to changing environments are the market leaders of the future.