|
Brief
To mark her Ruby anniversary as Britain’s leading cookery writer, Delia Smith decided to go Red with a total revamp of her Delia Online website (www.deliaonline.com).
Choosing Red Technology and its tradeIT content management system to take on the project has resulted in a crisp and feature-rich new website. Delia Online presents over 1400 of Delia’s tried and tested recipes and cookery techniques in a simple and accessible format, all completely free of charge to the user. In addition the site enjoys a thriving and loyalty community area where users can exchange ideas about food and cookery, and debate issues of interest with one another.
One of the largest cookery resource websites in the UK, the old Delia online site was becoming outdated in terms of design and functionality. The Delia Online team felt that it was time to take a fresh look at the site to take advantage of new and emerging technologies to enhance the experience of their loyal user base. They were keen to maximise new opportunities for users to interact with their content in new and interesting ways to ensure that the site maintains its position in what is becoming an increasingly competitive market sector. This prompted the team to search for a new platform provider.
Strategy/Execution
Leading content management system provider, Red Technology has a wealth of experience in the web industry. Their tradeIT CMS has given the Delia Online team a great deal more control and flexibility in creating and designing their web pages in-house, empowering them to make immediate changes to the site.
In addition, the tradeIT CMS allows the team to have absolute control over user communications, to tailor and update automated response emails such as requests for password reminders, forum notifications etc. As a result, they are able to be more responsive to their user’s needs and requests much more quickly than previously. Where for example one email format may not be as clear as it could be the team are able to amend and update in response to feedback from the site and ensure communications to their users are appropriate to the way in which they are interacting with the site.
Results
The new design has enabled Delia Online to present Delia’s recipes in lots of different formats, making it faster and easier for users to find either a specific recipe through the search facility or to gain inspiration from the wealth of image led collections now available to browse and navigate to.
“Delia is thrilled with her new website, and thinks it looks very modern, clean, and crisp.”
Nikki Dance, Business Manager, Delia Online
The community section of the site has been enhanced. For example users can now upload their own avatars, enter and create lively debates on a whole host of discussions and share their recipes including photos with other users. In the first month since launch nearly 800 forum topics have brought close to 6000 posts in the forum section of the site. The team have plans to further develop this area of the site significantly in line with the growing popularity of social media on the web and are looking to introduce some key new areas for the users to interact with Delia’s and each others’ content in the near future.
Taking into account the current impact of social media on the web in general, bookmark widgets such as Facebook were introduced to recipe pages on the site to provide online users an opportunity to share their favorite Delia recipes with their Facebook friends.
Users can add the ingredients from multiple recipes to a shopping list which totals quantities of like terms to create comprehensive list that can be printed off and taken to the supermarket.
Along with the more tailored features for the Delia Online website, there are also more web generic aspects that Red Technology looks to implement in each project. Factors such as SEO URL’s and having administrator controlled meta-data create search engine friendly websites. The strong content management system allows the Delia Online team to be able to plan web campaigns in advance by scheduling home page content to appear on the website in line with seasonal plans the team may have set up.
“The tradeIT CMS creates the foundation for the Delia Online team to provide its users with a website that keeps its core traditional values of good food and teaching the art of cooking, as well as using the latest Web 2.0 technologies to better engage with its users.”
James Candy, Business Development Director, Red Technology
Red Technology host the www.deliaonline.com website from their primary high performance data centre located in the Docklands providing 24/7 operational support.
Red Technology continuously looks to move its tradeIT platform forward by releasing 2 to 3 updates each year, which incorporates the latest functionality to ensure clients have the very best web tools to compete on the web front line
|