Case Studies

M J Mapp, a property management company who manage nearly £4 billion worth of commercial concerns throughout the UK & Europe, were looking to get more out of their website. Their site had been created by graphic designers who merely created each page as an image. Their search engine placement was terrible, given that images can’t be read by search engines; moreover, they were charged hundreds of pounds each time they fixed a typo or changed content.

Whilst happy with the overall design, M J Mapp wanted to be able to add, amend or remove text & imagery at will. They also wanted to be able to do it easily, by people without HTML skills. In addition, they also wanted to retain the look & feel of the original site, using their non-standard font (a.k.a. “corporate typeface”) whenever possible. Finally, they wanted to extend the functionality of the site by managing employee’s contact details so they could add employees & automatically generate contact forms to those employees.

ardes were familiar with many of the problems M J Mapp had encountered & were able to accommodate all of their needs. Non-standard fonts—that is, fonts that aren’t found on all computers—can be difficult to use on the web. Few designers have the knowledge to deal successfully with this issue: luckily, ardes intimately understand the issues surrounding font embedding & have been able to render the entire site—headers, content and all—in their corporate typeface.

Now that the site can be rendered in their corporate typeface, the next issue was to enable M J Mapp’s employees to easily manage the site’s content. ardes have created a simple Content Management System (CMS) that lets users concentrate upon writing their content, not ensuring that they don’t break their sites. Content can be written either as simple text or HTML. It’s then automatically converted into semantically-correct HTML. To boot, we added a search engine that makes all of the site’s content just a click away!

The site also sports contact forms, both general & for individual members of staff. Because of our simple CMS, all employees’ details are available on the site & are rendered in the same way—with the same forms. Everything is consistent & easily managed by M J Mapp.

One of the aims ardes always has in mind for any website we create is “Return-On-Investment” (ROI): how quickly what we make for you will cover the costs of development. Our customers are very fortunate: by picking us, they’re getting a company & web application frameworks with proven track records.

In the case of M J Mapp, recording that ROI is very easy: by calculating the hundreds of pounds that those graphic designers charged them for each & every change, the company made back the money in about a week’s worth of editing. Now M J Map have a site that’s fully up-to-date—and it will stay that way & grow with them.