Abraxas - Case study.

PresideCMS is just the job for Abraxas

How a new content management system enabled a successful IT recruitment agency to easily manage and update its website

Abraxas is a successful IT recruitment agency based in London's West End. Formed in 1974, Abraxas became one of the largest and most successful UK-based recruitment companies. In 1997 it was acquired by Select Appointments, which later merged with the Dutch group Vedior, the world's third-largest staffing services organisation.

As a ‘people organisation’, Abraxas claims to be adept at the inter-personal skills that make relationships work for the long-term benefit of both candidates and clients. Therefore the company sees its website www.abraxas.com as an important part of that personalised approach.

New approach

Richard Walker, development director at Abraxas, explained: “About six months ago we decided to change the look and feel of the website and add new functionality - we wanted to ensure that it reflected the changing shape of Abraxas.”

Having received responses from several agencies to an Invitation to Tender for the new website project, Walker had a call out of the blue from Pixl8 Interactive – and liked what he heard. “Apart from Pixl8’s obvious design and development skills, they brought a new content management system, PresideCMS, to the table,” he said. “This solution seemed to be better than anything that the other agencies had put forward to help us solve our content management issues.”

Up until this point, the creation, management and uploading of content to the Abraxas website was “pretty archaic”, according to Walker. He added: “Each time we wanted to add some new content, we had to ask the incumbent design agency to do it for us. It was an inefficient process.”

PresideCMS is a powerful content management system that is affordable, scalable and easy to use. Designed for websites, intranets and extranets, it offered Abraxas’ recruiters and other line-of-business users the ability to take control of creating, managing and maintaining their own website content.

Meeting changing business needs

“With PresideCMS we have the opportunity to change the site as our business evolves and as our clients demand. That’s what we found most attractive about it,” added Walker.

With only 6-8 weeks to get the new website from concept to launch, Pixl8 had to work fast. “We had some ideas on how we wanted to personalise the site and make it much more user friendly and rapid in terms of job search functionality,” said Walker. “Pixl8 worked closely with us on the design and development and the integration of the new content management system. One key advantage of PresideCMS is that it is very user friendly, plus it does all we want it to do in terms of content provision for the site.”

Scalability was also a crucial factor in the selection of PresideCMS. Walker concluded: "Abraxas is a growing business and we needed to be sure that we could manage website expansion easily and quickly. PresideCMS enables us to do that.”