CIA 2000
Overview
CIA 2000 came to us to review their website and see how we could make it work better them, moving away from the static information site that it had been currently. The website was a few years old and had a few of the usual time-related issues such as not being mobile responsive or optimised in any way for mobile devices such as phones and tablets.
In addition to this, CIA felt that the website as it stood did not suitably represent the company values – the dated design was not indicative of the forward momentum that CIA 2000 were investing in internally and a lot of the content was out of date.
Our Approach
Spotlight Studios built a website with a focus on a strong modern, image-lead and responsive design to ‘wow’ potential clients on all platforms. We built the website in partnership with CIA 2000’s new logo and branding guidelines to better emphasise the companies brand as a forward-thinking security company and modernise the approach that clients, new and current, could use to get in touch and find out more information about their products and services and read about what was happening with CIA and the security world in general from their news pages.
Challenges
Overall the website was not benefiting the business; it was not helping to convert sales and some instances it was potentially putting potential clients off doing business with them. There were very few calls to action (if any) and the dated design was reflected technically with poor SEO performance.
The previous site did not allow CIA 2000 to add or update news items which was a feature that they requested (and one that we recommended) in their new website.
Solution
The website was designed using ‘mobile first’ principles so that we were able deliver a fantastic responsive experience across all devices from mobile phones, to tablets to laptops and desktop computers. Rather than simply ‘bolt-on’ a mobile version of the website which can often look busy as elements and crammed into a small screen. This allowed us to engineer call-to-actions that are clean, clear and non-obtrusive and we’ve also ensured that telephone and email links integrated directly with the devices phone / email client to provide an immersive experience from the home page to contact.
The website was updated with new content and we sourced a number of images together with CIA 2000 to brighten the website up and break up text with relevant, eye-catching photography.
Although we had not started any kind of SEO strategy at this stage, where links differed (due to the new page structure) we setup re-directs so that any existing rankings for security related keywords were maintained and we ensured that the pages were reasonably optimised for google with fast page speeds with a hope of making some small gains in this area.
Our next short-term step will be to perform an SEO Audit of the website that we can use as a base for an ongoing SEO and Marketing campaign moving forwards
Results
Within a week of launching the new website, we were advised that CIA Ltd secured a new contract on the back of their professional looking website.
The ability for customers and prospective customers to view the website on mobile as well as PC was particularly valuable and there was a steady increase in organic traffic over the course of the following month as the pages (which were created with SEO in mind) were indexed by Google.
Support
Business Hosting with a CDN and Active Firewall
We host CIA 2000 on our Business Hosting Platform, which has a 100% network uptime SLA as well as daily backups, Malware scans and an active Web Application Firewall to protect it from any attacks.
A global Content Delivery Network (CDN) has been configured so that the website can be accessed instantly whereever the user is in the world. This also reduced the weight on the server itself, keeping it lighting quick. Another benefit that we were able to setup is for the webste to be “Always Online” so that even if the server did go offline (or there was a connection error) the CDN would deliver a cached version to the user, so that the website stayed online.
This level of redundancy was important to CIA 2000, being in the security sector.
WordPress Webmaster
Our Webmaster services ensures that CIA 2000 is updated quarterly and includes additional backups and security. This ensures that the WordPress core, Theme and Plugins are kept up to date so that any known vulnerabilities are fixed and there are no compatability errors as the technology and server versions are updated.
SSL Certificate
An SSL Certificate provides two key benefits. Primarily, it protects all of the data that is sent through the websites forms which is essential for a company that is in the security sector. In addition to this, a padlock on the browser address bar allows visitors to know that they are on the correct website and increases user confidence. If there was a data leak, the certificate is insured up to £1,000,000.
Feedback
The initial feedback from CIA was fantastic, they loved the design of the new website and within a few weeks of the website going live we were advised that CIA received a new lead and converted the sale directly on the look of the new website and we suspect that future clients have also been more likely to do business with CIA based on having a more attractive and more focused website drawing traffic to the relevant sections of the website.
Although we have not yet started an SEO campaign with CIA, the focused content and building the new website with SEO in mind has increased their native ranking for several security-based keywords because of the new site.