3i Limited (www.3ilimited.com) are a well known branding, marketing and design agency based on Auckland’s North Shore.
Their real focus has always been on strategic thinking and planning, especially in the areas of branding and market positioning. A major part of all this is design; helping clients visually represent themselves to the market in accordance with the brand strategies established.
Naturally much of their work involves websites, but rather than employ in-house developers, 3i took the decision early on that they’d concentrate on their design and strategic skills and produce the design and structure of each website, whilst partnering with a more technically focussed website company to build the technical part of the site.
So, how has this approach worked out?
“With our earlier partner relationships prior to Contegro we thought we’d got a great business model” says Tim Ellett, 3i’s Managing Director – “it allowed us to focus on what we knew we were good at yet still enabled us to provide a complete, end to end web solution.” However, in practice, things didn’t work out quite as planned!
The first difficulty they encountered was in design limitations. “The company we partnered with was very much a template driven company and too often the designs we provided with client sign off just couldn’t be replicated on their system” says Tim.
“Being forced to compromise on design was not only particularly frustrating” continues 3i’s Creative Director, Stuart Lowbridge. “It also had an effect on the ultimate success of the client’s online marketing. Everything we do in design is to help generate the maximum ROI for our client, and forms part of a coordinated marketing strategy across all mediums. Being forced to change website designs often meant changes had to be made elsewhere in order to ensure brand consistency.”
The second major difficulty stemmed largely from the way the working relationship between 3i and the website provider was structured. Rather than completely fronting and managing the build, the website company was given direct access to the client. In theory this direct line of communication should have allowed things to run smoothly, but in reality led to the client too often being given inconsistent messages from its two providers - causing confusion and bad feeling. In most cases the client only wanted one point of contact for what they took to be a single project, i.e. the commissioning of a website. “One thing we vowed to do in any future partnerships with a supplier” said Tim “was to ensure that we had full control over the whole project, keeping the technical partner completely in the background”.
The final set of difficulties came from the fact that the website provider did not deliver the speed and quality of response that 3i expected and that then impacted on the final delivery of work they were taking responsibility for.
So what lead to a change?
“Basically it all came down to a chance encounter with a bald man in a pub” explains Stuart!
“I was out one Friday having a drink in a pub with some mates when we met Allan Kent, the Business Development Manager for the Contegro website CMS system. This chance encounter over a few beers led to us finding out more about the benefits of becoming a Contegro Partner and in very short time us signing up with them”
From Stuart’s point of view, one of the chief benefits in working with Contegro is that there are basically no design constraints. “Basically, if it can be built in CSS it can be built easily on Contegro” he says. “In addition, the team at Contegro, who are themselves very design focussed, offer excellent guidance if I want to do something slightly out of the box” he adds.
Tim elaborates further – “The main difference in working with Contegro is that we now fully ‘project manage’ the entire process, not only from start to finish, but beyond that too. The Contegro people are kept completely in the background and have no direct interaction with the client. We provide the ongoing after care service once the site has gone live, including user training, ongoing design tweaks even content management if required. This not only gives us a chance to continue to build the relationship with our client over many years but to also generate ongoing revenue from them – revenue that previously went straight to the website company not us. With Contegro, we even invoice the client for the hosting services they provide giving us a passive revenue stream too!”
So what is the next step for 3i?
“Despite the recession, we’ve managed to stay very busy, so busy in fact that we’ve still not had a chance to revamp our own website and put it onto the Contegro platform as well!” says Tim. “It’s certainly one of the pressing things we want to do, hopefully sometime in the next few months if we get a break!”