The Background
We have worked with PizzaExpress since 2008, when we redeveloped their website in partnership with the London creative agency, Work Club. The site was an immediate success, with monthly visits to the site doubling within the first two months of launch.
Mixing mouth watering imagery with cutting edge web technology, it has created the perfect platform for PizzaExpress to engage with their customers.
The Challenge
Due to the success of the site, there was a constant need for PizzaExpress to update their site with new content during the first 6 months following the website’s launch. We had been carrying out this work as part of our regular maintenance of the site, however there was a mutual agreement that certain areas of the site would benefit from being content managed. This would allow PizzaExpress to push minor updates through within minutes, giving us more time to devote to the technical development of the underlying system.
The Response
After assessing the requirements for the content management system (CMS) in the summer of 2009, it was clear that a bespoke system would be a much better solution than an off the shelf package. We worked closely with PizzaExpress to prioritise their requirements and produced a phased approach to the solution; this allowed us to deliver the most important functionality in the earlier stages of the project.
Our User Experience and .NET development team worked closely together with PizzaExpress to produce an intuitive and elegant system that allows the PizzaExpress web team to log into the site as an administrator and edit key content areas online, instantly previewing each change.
Following the release of the first phase, we re-visited the requirements for phase two implementing additional functionality in keeping with the evolving needs of the business.
Phase two was developed in parallel with a number of other projects, including the redevelopment of the Milano website (PizzaExpress’ sister brand in Ireland) and the Francesco Mazzei site takeover, and was released in January 2010.
The Result
The result is a system that allows PizzaExpress to make important updates to their site, keeping the content fresh and up to date for their customers - in the time that it would take their web team to write us an email requesting an update, they can carry it out themselves!
Jane Ahern, Head of Brand Development at PizzaExpress was extremely pleased with the system that we created for her and her team:
“Superb, brilliant job - thanks very much guys!
It is great that we can now update our website ourselves.
Thank you for all the hard work in getting this live, it has run very smoothly and we are all really pleased with the high quality and easy to use interface you have created for us.”
We continue to work closely with PizzaExpress on a number of exciting projects including the recently launched ‘Create you Pizza’ campaign. Watch this space for more exciting developments!