Client Case Study - Design UK

Design UK Partners with Hostway to Enable Customers
to Carry out Fast, Effective Online Marketing

The Internet has become an essential marketing tool for any company that wants to succeed. Marketing departments need to have the capability to quickly roll out online marketing campaigns, optimise their websites, drive web traffic, and to keep their content updated on a regular basis. However, without the right technical knowledge and with internal IT resources often limited or tied up with company wide roll-outs, marketing professionals often end up outsourcing website management at great expense.

A partnership between Design UK, an independent digital agency, and Hostway, a leading web hosting company, has helped to overcome this problem by enabling marketing professionals from companies such as Selfridges, Hackett and the Royal Society to carry out cost effective online marketing without requiring internal or external IT support.

Design UK, an independent digital agency based in London, created a content management suite, Lava, aimed at marketing and business personnel, which is intuitive and easy to use. Unlike enterprise level systems, Lava requires very little technical knowledge to use, allowing marketing professionals to focus on marketing rather worrying about the technical details.

In order to offer a fast, efficient service to its customers, Design UK chose to outsource the hosting and support of its clients’ websites. After experiencing problems with a number of large hosting companies, Design UK made the decision to partner with Hostway.

“After several bad experiences, we were attracted to Hostway because of their ‘can do’ attitude and ability to offer highly reliable support,” explained Leigh Whitney, operations director, Design UK. “Hostway’s worldwide presence was also a key selling point for us as we have many international customers, and it also enables our clients to store data in different countries to meet various data protection acts.”

Once Design UK has designed and built a client’s website, Hostway takes over the installation of Lava. Hostway has trained a number of its employees in Lava so that they are able to deploy it quickly and easily. Following implementation, the client is then able to manage and update the website themselves, as well as carry out email marketing, ecommerce, web stat monitoring and search engine optimisation tasks. To ensure clients’ sites are running 24/7, Hostway provides around the clock support and management.

“Before working with Hostway, we couldn’t offer 24/7 support which was a cause for concern for some customers as their sites need to be permanently up and running to meet customer demands,” commented Leigh Whitney. “Now support couldn’t be easier as Hostway takes care of it for us.”

Through working with Hostway, Design UK can now offer its clients a complete web package that is easy to use, at a very competitive price. Since all of its hosting and support is looked after by Hostway, Design UK is able to deliver more quickly to clients, which is critical for marketing departments who often need immediate results and have tight deadlines to meet.

“Prior to partnering with Hostway, we spent a lot of time trying to understand the hosting needs of our clients,” explained Leigh Whitney. “Because we no longer need to do this, we have been able to save time and money, and focus on creating innovative sites for our customers as well as winning new clients. We are also able to deploy solutions to clients much faster with excellent service levels. This is key for our clients, such as Selfridges who need to be able to carry out online marketing at the touch of a button.”