Corporate website design

When the IT division of a mid-sized corporate was tasked with managing the web provision throughout the business, Brian was tasked with sourcing a suitable microbrand and intranet sites system.

Various business units had been making their own websites, and this had now got out of hand: the mixture of technologies was making it difficult to manage licensing; when people moved from group to group their skills were not transferrable; and the corporate website design image was not being enforced. In short, it was a mess.

What they didn't want to do was centralize the website provision, as that would give the IT division more work, and would remove the benefits of letting people publish and collaborate online directly. They needed a system that would allow everyone to be their own site administrator, yet in a centrally-provisioned and controlled way. It needed to support multi-lingual content, provide workflow and approval support, and have inherent role-based access control, whilst maintaing the corporate website design.

Brian knew his users had a wide range of technical skills, so he needed something powerful enough to keep the advanced users happy, whilst easy enough for new users to create professional sites straight away. What's more, he needed to keep costs down so spending hundreds of thousands wasn't an option.

Evaluating alternatives

Brian started by looking at some of the solutions offered by the major IT corporations, however these were unattractive: they were incredibly expensive; they needed a major retraining exercise; and despite initial appearances, they were not as integrated as expected, but an accretion of technologies from past acquisitions.

Next up were open source solutions. Whilst ostensibly 'free', closer examination showed the total cost of ownership to be equally expensive once support fees, custom development, and having to hand-fix incomplete features and bugs were taken into account. None were mature enough to stisfy the corporate web design requirements.

Brian settled on clearString for its simple per-server licensing, comprehensive feature-set, and ease of roll-out to users with seamless deployment (with no client-side software to be installed and licensed for each admin, this was simplicity itself) 

Getting started

Brian started out with the free license, which allows unlimited development but is rate-limited. This was sufficient for a tester group drawn from thoughout the business to prove it met their needs. This was then upgraded to a full license, and the members of the tester group went on to act as evangelists in their various business units.

They have since purchased several more licenses to run on other servers.

User reaction

Brian reported users found the content management facilities intuitive, but they soon started using the more advanced features, notably the built-in database and form / email integration to improve their workflows. They were liberated by knowing that they had unlimited number of business database apps - no limit to the new features they could seamlessly bring online.

Admin reaction

For Brian and his IT department the benefits were even more profound: working on a restricted budget, they had been able to use the system's fine-grained user permissions to keep control over the sites, and by removing web development software from individual machines they had saved on license management and machine patching maintenance tasks.

Learn more about the clearString features that helped Brian fix his corporate website design issues...

The customer insight stories in this section are based on feedback from our clients, but we have changed their names to protect their identities.