All Portfolio posts

No charge for the photo: marketing Cambridge’s biggest landlord

How many properties do you think the biggest landlord in Cambridge owns? 20? 50? 100? Amazingly, having bought his first home in 1965, Dennis Whitfield has accumulated a portfolio of over 500 properties in the area. That’s a lot of houses.

The Whitfield Group are a genuine, local success story, having started small and built over time. The only thing they didn’t have in place was a useful presence on the web so they approached us at Endis Solutions asking for a simple site through which to advertise their services and empty properties.

The challenges from the content side were:

Sprezzatura (making complexity appear simple)

The Cambridge University Accommodation Service provide a remarkable service: they find lodgings for thousands of University people; or find tenants for the University, colleges and private landlords, depending how you look at it. The remarkable bit is that their friendly, personalised service is free – even to landlords most of the listings are without charge.

To make this happen through a web site is difficult, because there are so many parties involved. Students, scholars and staff are looking for accommodation, but sometimes departments look on their behalf. The University wants to fill its houses and rooms, as do individual Colleges, but only sometimes, and sporadically. Private landlords also want tenants, and hotels and B&Bs would like to advertise in case anyone needs a short-term stopover…

And the staff need to co-ordinate all this behind the scenes.

The difference an hour makes

I offer a free hour so that you can taste the difference I could make to your web site as a content strategist – for absolutely nothing.

Only an hour? What could I possibly do in that time?

The answer (so far) is plan a blog post, write a tag line, critique a page or a whole web site, write a piece for a front page, or meet someone in the pub to talk about content strategy as a career …

Here are 3 highlights from some recent free sample requests:

Holding back notes on the trumpet and coming out top on Google

Two things stand out for me about estate agent Kevin Henry.
Firstly, they have a genuine passion about Saffron Walden because they’re local and have lived there for years, unlike the corporate agents who open hollow branches everywhere.
Secondly, because of this authenticity and experience – and years of hard work – they are repeatedly the number [...]

5 ways to prevent the portfolio problem

I recently completed some work rebranding Endis, the sister company of the web business I work for. As well as specific sales and support web sites, Endis wanted an umbrella site for their UK brand. Simple, direct branding, with links off to the other sites (if you get geo-coded off to the US site, that was nothing to do with me. Just talking UK here).

Endis are a fantastic company with pedigree in web site development. Their unique and helpful platform works for both small and large organisations; commercial and charitable, as an off-the-shelf CMS and for fully customised sites.

Show, don’t tell – better user experience from environmental content

Share Insight is the new support site for the Endis Insight platform. Because it is not a sales site, and the majority of content is generated by members (in forums) and staff (articles, guides, release notes, video), it contained little static content when I was asked to look at it.

This kind of content could be called supporting copy, creating the supporting frame for the interactions which take place upon the web site. Another term I like (and just coined I think) is environmental content: the content which sets the environment for users to interact.

Setting the right environment for a web site where existing customers come for support demands a clear user experience and easy access to the help that they need.

Converting coffee table book into compelling web site

After the fourth edition of SevenHolidays’ successful book Resorts of Maldives, it was time to go online. Firstly to serve the same purpose but to a wider audience and for free: to educate holidaymakers about which resort is best for them with personal, unbiased reviews and photography. Secondly, to sell those holidays.

The book is a page turner. Enjoyable to read, as you marvel at the luxurious top resorts, and get sucked in to deciding which resort you would like the most. Putting all this information online (free) from a content perspective was about finding a neat way to present the reviews and photography, but more importantly, of sucking people in in the first place.