Goodman Jones goes live with dynamic website

by admin on May 31, 2006

in Innovation

In recent weeks, I’ve been working alongside David Terrar of Twinfield and Philip Woodgate to roll out Goodman Jones’ website. Unexciting, me-too and zero innovation – you might think. Take a look for yourself, compare with other sites and let me know what you think.

From a technical perspective, we worked as a virtual team sharing information using the tools with which the site was built – Tribal CMS. I’m not a huge fan of the Tribal system because of its clunky Java implementation running over crabby ADSL lines to my Mac PowerBook.

The main thing is that Philip says his local team is more than happy and his partners believe the site is a fair reflection of their business values. Proving that what’s good for me may not be so good for you but hey – that’s human nature. More important, the site is designed to be dynamic and fully self-sustaining by the firm’s partners.

This is phase 1 – a stake in the ground. Phase 2 will be much more interesting.

We’re recording a podcast about the implementation which also talks about how GJ is using a clutch of technologies to help in its next stage of growth. That will be available for distribution later in the week.

Technorati Tags: ,

Tagged as: Innovation

Comments have been disabled for this post.
Sort: Newest | Oldest
David Terrar

Hi Manoj,
The website pulls together a change in approach and rebranding that has been driven by the managing partner Larry Philips and others, like Philip, over a period of many months. It's part of a strategic move to use online services to win business and to focus on what they are good at - so the website and associated web strategy positions where they are now as a practice.

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Philip Woodgate

Hi Manoj. I'm pleased you like it.

David and Dennis have done a great job. It's fair to say the website represents where we are as a firm now. The original content was written by us, but having outside help on editing, redrafting and honing the content was a significant benefit. As Dennis notes this completes Phase I. We need to move forward further and this will by Phase II and it's something I'm looking forward to greatly.

Thanks again for taking time to comment.

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Manoj Ranaweera

It's great! I had a sneak preview before you went live thanks to xxxx. It certainly does not look like the typical accountancy practise.

The question is can the business change to reflect the new look. If not you may not achieve what you intended. We are walking in to muddle grounds of organisational culture change...yes, Dennis MBA stuff..nevertheless should not be ignored.

Need to look at Tribal CMS. I wrote HTML code to get ours done. It is time consuming. What I am crap at is graphics..

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
David Terrar

Hi Philip,
You shouldn't worry. At the time Dennis had posted, our team had switched the URL's over so nobody would have followed the link to the tired, old site.

Dennis,
I know you're not a fan of Tribal, but it's a good Open Source option that does the job adequately, and was one of the ways we kept the budget down to a manageable level so GJ could spend more on our (that's yours and mine) professional help with the content. The podcast will explain that the collaboration went as far afield as Columbia as well as Spain (and Reading).

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Philip Woodgate

Dennis, we will laugh about this one at a later date. You are just too ahead of the game. At the time you posted this we hadn't swapped from the old website to the new.

For anyone looking at this now:

Blue background = old website

White background = new website

If you see the blue background then please come back later and see the new website.

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like

Previous post:

Next post: