The Brief
Capita Symonds are one of the UK’s largest consultancies for property and infrastructure. In 2009, after we’d delivered some successful digital marketing campaigns for them, they trusted us to be their technical partners to redevelop their main corporate site.
They had their own design agency, who had produced some wireframes and design assets, so our job was to turn these into a fully-featured site. In 2012, they asked us to take our own look at the designs and complete a further project to modernise the look, improve some features, and bring the content to the fore.
The Challenges
The new site had to reflect the sheer size and scale of the consultancy, as they employ over 4000 staff across 50 offices, and work on projects all over the world. They have departments covering everything from health to transport, and each of these services needed to have a home on the site.
We needed to use an enterprise-level CMS that would give them plenty of scalability, and be able to incorporate lots of other technologies for different features on the site. This includes using Google Maps for geo-locating content, RSS to help Capita Symonds deliver key news to their customers, streaming video to show off their rich media content, and pulling in external data feeds from various sources that would auto-publish updated content.
The Process
One of the biggest changes we made in our refresh of the site was the homepage. We added a range of different background images which each show off one of their main projects. A click of a button in the footer removes the other content from the page so the image is shown full-screen with a brief description of the project and a link to the main case study. The main content on the page is an amalgamation of lots of bits of news and information that are pulled through from various sections to encourage users to delve deeper into the site.
Making content more present and accessible was one of the main goals for our changes. We created a new landing page for news and events which pulls through all kinds of content – including the latest news articles, talking point blog posts, YouTube videos, and events. This made the page into much more of a ‘news hub’ which offered a bit of everything they had been up to lately, rather than just a list of press releases.
Other improvements we made included making it easier for users to search, both generally with the additional of useful filters, and on the contact page, where you can now search for a specific person to contact based on expertise type, sector or region.
The Results
The original finished site was a total success for the consultancy, and was quickly adopted by their internal departments as one of their key marketing tools.
The recent changes have just made the site even more effective, by giving the site a slick, modern design which really matches their business image, and bringing the content out so it’s much easier to see what services and information Capita Symonds have to offer.
We needed an agency that would quickly understand our business proposition and ambitious site designs, to deliver us the solution we needed. Sequence did this efficiently, professionally, and enthusiastically.
Tom Shapland
Digital Marketing Manager, Capita Symonds