I’ve
been with DSCallards since 2007. As the
Marketing Manager one of my key roles is to ensure that our website presence
reflects our culture, technical brilliance as well as the services and products
that we offer.
As
we are a technical organisation, the Development Team have had a say in the
types of tools we use to develop our websites.
In the early days we used DreamWeaver, then Open Source Joomla seemed
like a good idea, then we moved onto pure HTML because of the potential security
threats, then back to DreamWeaver.
Having
gone full circle, and with the task of creating a brand new website, the
Development Team suggested we used MS Visual Studio and a series of Bootstraps. At first Marketing was a little hesitant
having been sent around the houses over the course of nearly a decade.
According
to Wikipedia, Microsoft Visual Studio:
“Microsoft Visual
Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from
Microsoft. It is used
to develop computer programs for Microsoft
Windows, as well as web sites, web
applications and web
services. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development
platforms such as Windows API, Windows
Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows
Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce
both native code and managed
code.
This
was all well and good but what about the design element?
The
Development Team had an answer for this.
By using a Bootstrap design template, we should be able to design and
develop a website to be proud of.
Marketing
put together a Website Brief and sent it to a number of web design agencies.
The responses we received weren’t particularly impressive especially given the
many thousands of pounds it was going to cost us.
We
finally decided to run with the in-house MS Visual Studio idea to develop a
website that promoted the SAP Business Objects element of our business: The Business Objects People.
Here’s
the outcome:
We
were very happy with what we had developed in-house utilising both our
technical Microsoft expertise and knowledge of our business and what we were
trying to say.
In
fact, we were so pleased, we went on to redevelop a new site to promote our
Development services:
I
am now in the process of working with our Development Team to redevelop our
corporate website – www.dscallards.com – from a pure HTML website to MS Visual
Studio.
We
have kept to the same bootstrap and look and feel for an integrated branding
approach across our offerings. Hits to
the websites are good and it is easy to incorporate the SEO requirements from
Google to keep our sites at the top of the organic listings. Also, via the
Bootstrap template technologies available, the sites are mobile friendly –
another Google SEO requirement.
Having
tried many different website designs, tools and technologies and having looked
at outsourcing to third parties, I believe that so far the MS Visual Studio
approach has been the most successful for us as a company.
The reasons are:
- Design tools are intuitive
- Relatively inexpensive
- Easy to update
- Excellent design facility utilising bootstrap technology
- SEO friendly
So,
moving forward, I’m looking forward to launching our new DSCallards site over
the next month or two. I’ll then embark
upon redeveloping the rest of our portfolio of websites. So, you could say that after a bit of a
reluctant start I’m now a fully-fledged MS Visual Studio convert!
Written by Adriane Gillies, Marketing Manager, DSCallards
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