The Gateway website: what went well

The Gateway website: what went well

Today we're rather excited to be launching the Gateway Energy Solutions webiste. I've really enjoyed working on this project, and we're all proud of the site. There are a couple of things that I think made a significant difference on this project and helped it to run smoothly, and they are…

Parent company FEC Services knew that Gateway needed a much stronger web presence than its single page on the FEC website, but were unsure what direction the new website should take. They asked us to help, so we kicked the project off by running a workshop where copywriter Jane Heaton and I spent a morning with whole Gateway team. We basically worked our way through the structure of our soon-to-be-launched project survey, asking the team to explain what they do, who for, and what each of them wanted as an outcome.

The Gateway team were happy to follow our structure, and the result was that I was able to write a project specification that was signed off pretty much straight away.

The next point is perhaps the most significant: very often, the thing that takes longest in the development of a website is the gathering and writing of content. The Gateway team knew from the outset that, being extremely busy already, they weren't realistically going to be able to write content for their website any time soon, so they asked us to do it for them.

They might have been short on time, but what they did have was a fantastic collection of resources, marketing materials and articles. Jane spent time with the team gathering content together and discussing the tone, and following that, was able to generate a huge amount of content for the website in a very short space of time.

You can check for yourself by visiting the Gateway site, but the Gateway team have been really pleased with the results, and I think Jane really nailed the tone and approach.

I'm due to visit Gateway in a couple of weeks for a formal review session so it'll be great to go through the project in more detail, but we're already working on a new, bespoke project management system that will help to give structure similar to that followed on the Gateway project to all future web projects. Watch this space for more details!