The Town House Company
The Town House Company owns and manages a collection of luxury hotels in Edinburgh: Channings hotel, The Bonham hotel, The Edinburgh Residence and The Howard hotel.
The problem
When Town House Company Marketing Manager Kaye Clarke was looking to bring the company's website under a content management system (CMS), she needed a cost effective system that made page editing easy for non-technical staff, was continually being updated with new functionality, and that supported page-by-page customisation of metadata for search engine optimisation.
She said: "It was absolutely essential for us to be able to keep our hotels' websites up-to-date with fresh content, making regular changes to special offers, prices, descriptions and images to reflect the changing demands of each business.
"The company needed a system that would enable me to change the content of our web site as and when necessary, without having to rely on an external webmaster. I used to have to save up all the changes required so that the webmaster we were contracting could do them all at once, which saved us some money. Invariably this meant that our site was constantly out of date and we weren't using it as an interactive tool to communicate with our potential customers."
Ease of use
Kaye said she was very impressed by how easy the WMS was to use. "Everything else I had seen so far seemed limited in some way. With the WMS I am able to have complete control over everything - I don't need to rely on technical staff to do anything, and I am able to share the content editing work with other marketing colleagues. We are able to change all our photos, all our text, create as many new pages as we like, publish and unpublish pages, optimise each and every page for different search terms, provide different user access levels.
"Once it was brought under the WMS I was able to enter all the necessary content into The Edinburgh Residence's website in only four hours. As soon as I actually started building the site it was simple. I thought I'd be spending about a week on the project, and in fact I started at 10am and had finished by 2pm the same day!"
Search engine optimisation
Kaye also found it easy to optimise the site for indexing in search engine databases: "The WMS allows you to optimise each and every page for search engines: I was able to enter search metatag keywords and descriptions on a page by page basis. I was also able to create meaningful and helpful page titles."
Value for money
Kaye believes that paying a small monthly fee for use of the WMS has proved better value than paying a large one off sum for a content management package that included no ongoing support.
She said: "At first I couldn't get my head round the concept of paying a service provider a monthly fee to be able to use a content management system to update my site. Initially we were going to spend in the region of between £10,000 to £15,000 on redesigning our new portfolio of websites, and a suitable CMS. That's a lot for a relatively small business to pay in one lump sum. If we had done that, we would have been stuck with a CMS that wasn't being developed. Each time we needed additional functionality we would have had to pay big bucks to the agency to upgrade the system."
"The monthly fee we pay for the WMS includes technical support and regular system upgrades. Because Ezone's business is website content management, their focus is web site content management. Ezone is continually making improvements to the WMS, adding new features and optimising the system's usability.
"Since we've started using the WMS there have been more than twenty system upgrades. Each time we think it's just right, they find a way to make it even better! Many of the upgrades we've benefited from were not prompted by us. But some of them have been due to me and my team asking for changes."
Conclusion
She concluded: "If I had chosen to go with an alternative, and pay for the whole thing up front, by now I'd have to be spending another £20,000 with an agency for the necessary content management improvements to allow us to get the type of websites I want today. You have to plan for the future, and the fact is you never have the perfect website because things are always changing. This is the best way I've found to cope with that: the WMS is a CMS that is easy to use, search engine friendly and cost effective."
The Town House Company has recently been nominated for a Scottish Thistle Award based on the success of its online marketing strategy.