Archive for the ‘Creative Design’ Tag
Company Net Website on Top SharePoint
We are very pleased that our new website was accepted onto the Top SharePoint list today.
We have extended our approach to ensure AA accessibility and ensure a high degree of xHTML compliance whilst making sure that site performance is maximised. We are practicing what we preach and showcasing what is very achievable for SharePoint Internet sites. We have received great design input from our partners Red Dress Creative and Shaw Marketing and Design and combined their initiatives into our own final design for the site.
We are actively looking for many more SharePoint Website projects and believe that if you currently use SharePoint for your internal portal that there are significant benefits to be achieved by also puting your website on this platform.
These benefits include:
- Simplified content management requiring no coding experience
- Business users own and manage their content from end to end
- Single interface for managing intranet and extranet, reducing training requirement for staff
- Familiar Microsoft Office interface
- No reliance on third party suppliers to maintain company website
- Improved customer interaction through SharePoint discussion forum and blog capabilities
If you are a Microsoft Gold Partner then we are offering knowledge and skills transfer whilst building or migrating your own site to SharePoint. You can see more details here on the Partner Channel Builder Portal
Partnership Case Study – “Philip Hogg joins Company Net Panel of Experts”
We place great emphasis on our Partnerships and seek out the best to add business acumen and experience to our portfolio of services and solutions. Finding people who have a passion for business, a flair for creativity with a focus on technology solutions and a capacity to deliver, is a task we undertake readily and persistently. The reward is the opportunity to engage with some of the best business professionals we can find, in a variety of specialist fields.
All too often, the reality is that Companies try to do too much themselves, whilst believing they can stretch beyond their capabilities without impacting their clients. This leads, at best to compromising their solutions and at worst, failing to deliver adequately.
Combining keyskills allows for an unlimited potential to extend your solutions into your market place and provide your clients with the maximum value when purchasing your services. It carrys well beyond solid thought leadership onto providing a “Best of Breed” solution that provides your customers with exactly what they need.
Partnership Case Study
We recently engaged with a very experienced and respected Marketing Consultant, Philip Hogg. This opportunity came about as the timing was perfect for both of us and during a couple of conversations we easily realised that our passions and beliefs were very closely aligned in our joint fields. This has to be the root of all good business partnership and fundamental to its success.
I welcome Philip Hogg to our Panel of Experts and look forward to working with him on our projects. As we deliver high quality business consultancy to our customers, we are further strengthened by Philip’s presence.
About Phillip
For nearly 10 years Philip Hogg was Marketing Director for Miller Homes, the UK’s largest privately owned house builder . During this period Miller grew from the 26th to the 6thlargest housebuilder in the UK and was renowned for its approach to marketing, customer satisfaction and innovation.
Miller Homes lead the housebuilding industry in many aspects, in particular with its approach to e-marketing and pioneered 3 category leading websites – www.millerhomes.co.uk, www.mymillerhome.com and www.mymillerstreet.co.uk, these websites went on to become multi award winning and more importantly generated demonstrable business value.
The Partnership
Company Net was the technology partner who built these websites, engineered the integration with other enterprise systems and contributed significantly to the design and functionality, and success.
Philip has now set up a new consulting company – pHc – and the opportunity has arisen for continued collaboration with Company Net. The prize for both parties is to harness Philip’s marketing and user-oriented skills along with Company Net’s technical excellence and offer this package to other organisations.
About pHc
A FORMULA FOR SUCCESS
We’re specialists. Specialists in understanding.
By really understanding how people think and act we can develop appropriate strategies and help create successful products. We prod and poke, ask lots of questions, study how people behave and try not to jump to conclusions. Then after all of this, we create strategies and solutions.
We’re particularly skilled and passionate about Customer Experience Management (CXM), which is reckoned to be the next competitive battleground as product differentiation becomes more difficult and has a decreasing lifespan. We have specialist research skills and techniques that allow us to observe and measure the complete interface between customer/user and the brand – each interaction will create a customer emotion and an attitude that needs to be understood and managed.
This neatly links into another area where we are experienced – CRM– Customer Relationship Management. Often wrongly thought of as just software systems, when in fact it should be a cultural and holistic way of doing business. We help organisations to get maximum value from their CRMsystems by looking at how they interface with other systems and also how they use them – often the barriers to utilisation are nothing to do with the technology….
Usability and UI – User Interfaces– is the next area that we are passionate about. One of the driving philosophies behind the successful Miller websites was to make the sites intuitive and easy to use. The phrases “what would the user want” and “how would the user think” were key to making them a success. This philosophy is sadly missing from many websites and IT products; technically they may be excellent, but from a users perspective all too often they mystify, confuse and de-motivate.
Many of the above elements come together in the form of e-marketing. From website design, search engine optimisation, social, email and mobile marketing there is a common element – thinking and understanding how customers behave and then engineering solutions that are appropriate, relevant and business effective.
There is a science to what we do.
Balancing brands and customers – the Company Net and pHc way.
Strike value into your business and see the rewards of mutual thinking, collaboration and joint effort be rewarded in all that you do.
Project Scotland was the Top SharePoint Internet Site in the UK (for a while)
We were happy that our site built for Project Scotland rose up to top spot for a couple of weeks.
In the meantime we have been finalising our own site on MOSS 2007
Here is a quick preview:

Company Net Website
Other than good design our focus has also been on AA accessibility and xHTML compliance using HiSoftware tools and achieving excellent optimisation resulting in a nice reduction in overall footprint.

Answering the question that SharePoint has a large footprint
We will shortly be issuing a White paper to share the approach to Accessibility and Optimisation which we believe are fundamental to seeing SharePoint websites continue to flourish.
Top SharePoint Site Admission for Project Scotland
We were very pleased to have our site for Project Scotland accepted into the Top Internet Sites website today. See what you think and place your vote.

With creative design supplied by The Union and Dynamics CRM functionality surfacing through SharePoint and InfoPath by Company Net the end result has been very effective in driving this magnificent Scottish Charity’s goal of providing volunteering opportunities to 16-25 year olds in Scotland.
Accessibility
We will shortly be addressing the issue of accessibility in SharePoint websites and sharing our experience of overcoming the challenges facing developers when needing to produce xHTML compliant websites using SharePoint. The recently launched Hisoft Rich Text Editor, provides an advanced toolkit to allow the delivery of xHTML compliance with new found ease, including for example compliant Flash Movies. We are currently testing an AA compliant version of the Project Scotland website with excellent results and performance improvements which we will re-launch shortly. What’s important here is that we have been able to retro design the exiting site in a very short period of time. Along with great creative design capability, the accessibility issue is essential to overcome and we have taken the decision to showcase this in our own new website which has had design input from one of our Creative Partners Digital Face and Shaw and is shortly due for release.
We believe there is a huge opportunity for Creative Design Agencies to work with partners to devise and design top value websites for clients. Build upon your client’s existing investment in SharePoint without compromising any creativity and providing the client with a perfect combination of SharePoint’s impressive functionality for ECM, Internal Portals, Document Management, Search and Collaboration with public facing sites that are visually stunning, compliant and functional, with the essential ability to be administered with familiar experience internally.
The ball is rolling……time to get on board
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