Gentech International Web Site Redevelopment – Phase 1

We are very pleased to announce the recent launch of the new  Gentech International Web site. This launch is phase 1 of a large redevelopment project, bringing many new features and enhancements for the companies online visitors and web maintenance team,  such as:

• Full content management with bespoke content types
• Multilingual support with translation overview features and automatic browser language detection
• Clean URL paths for better search engine optimisation
• RSS feed syndication for integration into online marketing channels
• Ecommerce shopping basket and credit card verification
• Automatic indexing and search engine notification
• Dynamic error pages which automatically search for missing content

It all started with a little competition

Customer feedback would play a large part in developing the new Gentech Web site, we wanted to know what customers wanted from the site, what they liked and disliked about the previous site and what they would like to see in the future. We developed a email questionnaire with the incentive those taking part could win an iPod touch. Needless to say this approach resulted in a lot of quality feedback from users which helped identify the objectives for the project.

We also pooled existing statistical data to make some interesting finds, for example over 30% of visitors to the Gentech site are using Internet Explorer 6.  Many other agencies have dropped support for this browser and many more do not even check for compatibility – this is because average use of IE6 is understood to be around 15%. However our specialisation at Cookies & Java is the engineering and manufacturing markets and we appreciate use of this browser in these industries is much higher.

Taking content management to the next level

Typical content management systems tend to allow administrators to make simple changes to basic pages, such as change text and add images. The limitation with these systems becomes apparent when you want to work with structured data such as product details, job listings, supplier directories etc the data needs to be kept organised, allow filtering and be indexed for searching. For Gentech we created a range of bespoke content types which are easily created and updated but also strictly controlled in how they appear to the customer.

Ongoing development

Now phase one of development is complete we have started work on developing further features on the site including a product finder tool and extranet facility.