A new brand identity for Acision
A rebrand for Acision, a world leader in mobile data services, led to the redevelopment of its website and an opportunity to introduce a new content management system (CMS). 3chillies built the site using Sitecore CMS, giving Acision direct control of its online content and supporting an enhanced website experience.
Acision’s previous website was visually dark and practically quite challenging to manage. A rebranding exercise presented the opportunity for a lighter, fresher feel and a simpler platform for controlling web content. However, with only three months to launch a new site in time for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, rapid development was a key requirement.
3chillies had already completed successful projects for Acision and had a track record for building sites in a very short time frame. With a brief to deliver a new website with complete control and easy operation, 3chillies recommended Sitecore CMS which offers a flexible licensing model and an intuitive user-interface.
Based on new corporate branding, Acision’s design agency prepared design files for 3chillies to cut up and use to build all the HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets) for implementation as Sitecore layouts. 3chillies began building the site from scratch and worked closely with the designer to achieve an accurate rendition of the layouts.
Sourcing input and approvals from different business units was naturally time-consuming, but 3chillies was up front about scheduling and alerted the client if anything was going to slip because of delayed content. Adding to the pressure, Acision was undergoing an organisational restructure at the time, so the team had to take a number of changes into account during the site build, including new product names.
Despite the tight timeframe, in roughly two months 3chillies built a completely new website. Deployment began just after Christmas and launched on 12th February 2010, literally just days before the Mobile World Congress event.
The end result was a website perfectly aligned with corporate branding, and which behind the scenes is much easier to manage and control. At the Mobile World Congress, stand visitors commented that it is a lot brighter, cleaner and easier to navigate.
Staff and senior management have also praised the new site. The old system was time-consuming to update, and the majority of requests to change or add content had to be referred to developers at the previous web agency, adding more time and cost to the process. Now, nine times out of ten, Acision can do things in-house, unless a design or template change is required.
The design and build process took account of a number of business requirements, enhancing both user benefits and commercial value. For example, the provision of downloadable whitepapers enriches the content offering but also provides a data capture opportunity to support customer relationship marketing.
Sitecore CMS is a highly flexible platform, supporting rich, full-featured websites and scaling to meet virtually any need. Acision is intent on leveraging this functionality and is working with 3chillies to make areas of the website more interactive and dynamic, for example, enhancing the news and events pages, possibly with more video content, and adding a social media aspect to the careers section.
