The Brief

Sassy Spirit is a new business that is following the home-party plan business model. Company Director, Clare Manning has spent many years' working with companies that also implement this business model, as well as having broad project and event management experience.

Sassy Spirit approached Techware One with a number of complementary ideas but the uncertainty of how best to fit them into a single cohesive strategy that made the best use of today's technology and integration with the growing number of social media networks available.

The Solution and Strategy

A series of short consultation meetings were held online, with the notes outcome of each being recorded within collaborative web tools. This process allowed a picture of the requirements to rapidly develop and helped clarify some of the hard to define aspects of the client vision.

As well as discussing immediate goals, we discussed the long-term possibilities to ensure that the solution was as flexible as it needed to be, and avoided unnecessary work at a later date.

Using this process we generated a clear definition of what needed to be done and after some follow-up discussions, agreed the best route of implementing that strategy.

The Implementation

One of the first points agreed upon was that initially there would not be any online sales or e-commerce component to the solution. This allowed strategic risk to be minimised and focus given to the core web presence. It was agreed that e-commerce capabilities would be required at a later stage.

With this in mind, it made sense to provide the client with a web content management system (CMS).

• Web Content Management System:
  • Simple user interface empowering Sassy Spirit to control how their content is used and appears
  • The ability to add new pages and expand existing pages
  • Steer the direction of the site to emphasise strategic successes

A large part of the success of the home-party plan is determined by the word-of-mouth recommendation of existing customers. As such, integrating the solution with social networks such as Facebook was going to be an absolutely crucial aspect of a successful strategy.

Sassy Spirit wanted to focus on building a strong business model that did not include a marketing department at this time. With this in mind, we agreed to initially restrict social network integration to three key conduits: Facebook, and Twitter.

• Social network integration:
  • Consistent profiles established on essential networks for authoritative branding
  • Share buttons on specific website content items
  • Link site bi-directionally to social networks
  • Content from external networks pulled into the site, such as Twitter feed
  • Open Graph tags for rich Facebook and Google+ integration
  • Twitter Card tags for rich Tweets

Hand-in-hand with the social network integration came a requirement to view the website on a variety of social devices.

• Responsive layout to work on Mobile, Tablet and Desktop

Given that the initial client base was largely to be sourced from social media, the SEO aspect of the solution was not considered to be as crucial as it would be to most sites. SEO techniques are now sufficiently well-established that it is almost inexcusable for a new website not to use them. It could also be a deciding factor at a later date when e-commerce is added to the site. The strategy therefore included:

• Search Engine Optimisation techniques:
  • Human-readable web page addresses
  • Clean HTML5
  • Rich Snippets and Structured data from https://schema.org/
  • Multiple dynamic sitemap.xml files

Whilst not essential parts of the core requirements, a number of other components were included to ensure best-practice and a comprehensive solution.

• Support for 16 different styles of favourite icon to ensure professional look across all devices and channels
• RSS feed
• Appropriate ARIA tags to support screen readers

The Outcome

The web strategy had a smooth roll-out on the day of launch, ensuring that a complete solution was in place for the first Sassy Spirit party.  Techware One also completed tasks such as indexing within search engines and image optimisation, which allowed Sassy Spirit the freedom to focus on the business and not worry about the technology side of their offering.

The Future

The website included full analytics support, which combined with the insight tools provided by the various social media networks, means that Sassy Spirit have a clear view of their customer base and their interactions.

With the initial web presence established, a future phase is to review the most successful aspects and to refine and focus the strategy, strengthening the overall solution.

What the client says

"Starting from a blank piece of paper Techware One helped me to plan, sequence, grow and build the content for my website. Having had no previous experience, their input, ideas and help have been invaluable in realising the final design. I found the process to both nurturing and exhilarating and not the stressful crawl towards launch that I had anticipated. I am delighted with the final result and also in how simple Techware One have made it for me to update the content going forward. I would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone looking to overhaul or develop a new website."