Launch of the new Xbridge Services website

Time for a make over

We are all aware of the benefit of a business website in today’s competitive market place; with the internet becoming one of the foremost tools used to search for suppliers, customers and information. So the need to keep our own website fresh and relevant is of paramount concern. With this in mind, and following some frank and open discussions with our customers and business supporters we have embarked on an extensive redesign of our Xbridge Services website, which to be honest is overdue.

There are many web designers and developers advertising, so the first issue is who to choose. As the proposed site would include our product database and a quotation system operating in the background, we decided a web developer would have a better understanding of our needs and goals, and this was quickly borne out after a couple of telephone calls. We started the selection process with a list of criteria, a draft site map and style sheets; and then circulated these out to a number of web development companies to respond to, nothing really too difficult there you would think. This resulted in some surprising responses, from daily questions and long in depth telephone calls, to, at the other end of the scale complete silence.

And this was again reflected in the range of quotations returned. The range of pricing we received was interesting at the least. Submissions ranged from the dirt cheap, to “how much!!” and the conclusion we could draw from this was that some of the developers were just not listening to us, or taking time understanding our business or requirements. So finally, we short listed the responses down to three companies for further discussions and finally settled on one. Our selection process took us six weeks overall.

We needed to be able to talk face to face and review the development on a regular basis for our piece of mind and to keep overall control of the project. Starting with a kick off meeting the development progressed as we expected, throwing us questions we did not think of initially and sometimes not understanding, but with the help and patience of our developer we moved the project forward. Our database grew and stretched us a little but the problems with this were eventually resolved. The style grew from the initial look and feel and grew into one we could migrate to a new corporate image and develop a new style for branding and documentation.

As our product database was to be included as the reference detail behind the quote builder this grew substantially since the initial export from our Stock Control System into its current form. We needed to include additional detail once we understood the power behind the new website. This included additional fields for downloadable documents, related images, and a number of additional fields to provide and easy to use search for visitors to the website. So an initially simple task resulted in a huge rework of the information to product a usable and informative results page. This database currently holds over 60,000 products and supporting services.

One crucial part of the development for us was the metrics and statistical reporting on the website traffic. It is no good having a fantastic site if nobody can find it, or visits or we do not see any resultant business. So we looked at what Google analytics offered for this and our developer included an additional stats package. We believe we now have a comprehensive view of who looks at our site and how they found us. We integrated a live chat option to the site which gives visitors who may have questions or issues navigating around the site the option of chatting with our Sales advisors or Engineering team. Importantly this would give us a record of each page the visitor opens; so again we can start mapping trends and look to keep the site customer focused.

The final development has taken longer than expected but part of that was our issue, changing and adding to the requirements as we went along. Are we happy with the results? Well yes, our site has the expected look and feel, meets the criteria laid down at the very beginning, and also has exposed us to new visitors and customers from all around the world who would not have found us using the previous website.

It has not been easy, we needed to provide a lot more detail than initially expected and were required to put in a substantial amount of additional resources’ but we believe we now have a site which is relevant to our customers, together with a site we can manage, review and update quickly and easily.

Take a look for yourself at www.xbridgeservices.com

and we welcome your comments.