College of Optometrists - Case study.

College of Optometrists choose Preside CMS

The College of Optometrists is the professional, scientific and examining Body for optometry in the UK, incorporated as a registered charity by Royal Charter in 1995. The College's vision is to ensure policy makers and the public understand the unique role optometrists play in providing the nation's eye care.

Effective marketing tool

The College recognised that one of its most important marketing communications vehicles - its website www.college-optometrists.org - wasn't supporting its visionary approach, so it sought a solution.

James Samarasinghe, the College's IT Manager, explained: "We wanted to completely redevelop the existing website. It wasn't working as an effective marketing communications tool for our members or the general public. We didn't have an influential Web presence and it was awkward for our marketing team to create and manage the site content."

Pixl8 selected

The College selected Pixl8 Interactive, a leading Internet Consultancy and Design Services company, to help meet its online challenges. Pixl8 has extensive experience in designing exciting and compelling websites, intranets, extranets and portals, enabling organisations to communicate effectively online with customers, partners, suppliers and employees.

Pixl8's highly creative design capabilities are more than matched by its in-depth Web technology skills, which include .NET and J2EE, ensuring robust online solutions delivery.

Site mock-up

"We were very impressed with Pixl8's design and technical abilities," said Samarasinghe. "Unlike most of the other agencies, their initial presentation included a mock up design of the new site.”

The integration of design and development with the content management of the site was crucial to the College. Pixl8 is a leading content management system (CMS) consultancy with experience of both implementation and vendor selection and has completed over 30 CMS projects.

Preside CMS

"Pixl8's knowledge of CMS was very valuable. The company was able to give us advice on exactly what we needed for the new site and recommended PresideCMS as the most appropriate solution," said Samarasinghe.

PresideCMS is a powerful CMS that is affordable, scalable and easy to use. Designed for websites, intranets and extranets, it enables marketers and other line-of-business users to take control of creating, managing and maintaining their own content.

"The marketing team is responsible for website content and was impressed with the flexibility of the PresideCMS product - it seemed to offer more scope than other products we looked at," added Samarasinghe. "They were involved in the whole selection process and one of the key requirements was that the new CMS had to be straightforward and easy to use. Pixl8 was the only agency that provided us with a working model of the new site integrating into the CMS from the first meeting."

Easy to create, manage and publish Web content

With Pixl8 working on the design and development of the new site, the College's marketing team started working on new content creation and editing using PresideCMS after some initial training. PresideCMS supports .NET and J2EE, Linux and Windows platforms and also integrates with Microsoft Word. An easy-to-use interface means that it's simple to create, manage and publish Web content.

"It's easy to control who does what on the site using PresideCMS - you can just log on, navigate to the particular text boxes on the pages, create the content and publish in one straightforward process, without getting involved in back-end complications," said Samarasinghe.

Enhancing the visitor experience

The newly designed and content managed site went live in September 2005.

"The combination of Pixl8's design, development and content management skills and experience allows us to focus on how we structure and publish content for our various audiences, enabling visitors to navigate for information easily on our website," concluded Samarasinghe. "Using PresideCMS we can easily update all aspects of the site content, enabling us to save time, effort and cost and enhance the visitor experience."

For more information visit www.presidecms.com or call 0870 745 0726.