When we sat down at Executive Lets to look at their website we never anticipated just how far this project would push our skills and our scope for thinking outside the box. Our goal was to build a site that could pay for itself in 12months just in time saving. If the site could deliver new business and make the experience of working with the client a more pleasurable one then our goal would be exceeded and it’s these kind of challenges that we love.

First we did a full appraisal of the office IT system, how information was handled, who did what and what else plugged into the central database of properties. Executive Lets are Plymouth’s most successful independent letting agents and they handle a lot of property around the city, their central IT system feeds into popular property sites like Rightmove and it was logical to us that their IT system should also feed directly into their own website, something it wasn’t doing previously. This meant that staff were entering all the information twice, once on the IT system and then again in the back end of the website. Now we were the first to admit that we didn’t have the skills to do this (but luckily we know some people that do) so we got some dedicated coding built to handle the information and plug into the site that we’d designed and hey presto, it works!

The next stage was to also build a showreel feed to plug into their shop window screen to display properties, all controlled from one website, which in turn is controlled from their normal office IT system. This means that the office staff just have to enter information once and it updates everything at the end of each working day. The site is built around a content management system that is so easy to use that the office staff can update most pages of the site themselves on a daily basis.

Considering the extent of the project we turned this around in a couple of months and the cost was realistic, especially when you take into account the savings in staff time and also, of course, it looks great.