Comset

Comset are a Business Intelligence and Data consultancy in London with over 30 years of excellence in providing data consultancy for some of the UK’s largest companies. Comset contracted Channel Digital to build a new and rebranded website in late 2023.

Feedback from Comset

"Channel Digital have helped us to build a website that is far in advance of our expectations, and a great improvement on what we had before. Not only is it attractive and professional, but there’s so much more to it we wouldn’t have known about.  It loads very fast which is good for our users and should help us as we work on our Google search results.  It is very secure with automated updates and multiple layers of backups and security tools.  It is very easy to edit and has excellent analytics and tracking built in so we can easily see how it is performing. And there is a built-in email marketing system with opt-in for new prospects, and is fully GDPR and cookie-compliant."

"Feedback from our users even at this early stage has been excellent.  Our thanks to the Channel team for your assistance, and your friendly and expert collaboration."  Philip O’Brien, Managing Director

Brief – A new design and build

The team at Comset wanted a fresh design and a fully future proofed website that would be lightening fast and help drive new business enquiries.  Their exisiting design was dated and had very poor reach online with Google only able to read one page of the existing site. 

The Solution

Working with one of our design partners a refreshed brand and logo and well-defined brand values and guidelines was created.  Next the look and feel of the website was developed and delivered, and the build commenced.  View the Comset.co.uk website here.  

Key Features

• WordPress "Full Site Editing" technology
• Content Management
• Automatic multi-tiered backup solution
• Yoast SEO plugin
• Contact Forms
• News and Blogging 
• Channel's security hardening process and monitoring systems
• Active Campaigns email marketing integration
• Integrations read to use including Google, Stripe, Slack, Amazon S3, Facebook and more. 

WordPress with Full Site Editing 

WordPress was used for the build due to its many strengths – particularly being a free to use CMS platform, having a very wide range of add-ons available, and when well-configured being very fast loading and SEO-friendly.

There was a design decision taken to future-proof the website by using the new WordPress “Full Site editing” technologies, which is the way that WordPress has pitched its future. Full Site editing will allow the user on each page to have more control over the layouts of each page. In some websites there are still the older editing methods available, those legacy features were deliberately excluded from this build in order to simplify and future-proof the site. To support this we used as a foundation for the site a popular WordPress theme called Neve-FSE, which is proven to be particularly fast-loading in a variety of key tests, and which was a good platform on which to implement our new designs.

Content Creation 

The Comset team were very proactive about creating content, which means the site was able to go live with more than 20 pages about their core technologies – SAP Business Objects (And SAP cloud Analytics), both parts of the SAP BTP Platform, and the Microsoft product set – Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric (their new data platform).

SEO and Yoast

As ever Channel created a website to be very SEO-friendly, highly secure and with built-in DR as it backs up automatically each day to 2 separate locations.  We used “Yoast” the popular SEO plugin to make it easy for the SEO team to optimize the pages for search, and to manage the Schema snippets on each page.

Security and Backups

For security we went through out usual process of hardening the site and server, and applied our set of security tools and modifications to make it an extremely secure site and we setup an automated multi-tiered backup solution

We also took the step of automating the update of all elements of the website, which minimizes future administration needs and keeps the site secure in the long term.  The site updates its WordPress core version and all plugins the moment they become available.

Email Marketing

For email marketing Comset selected Active Campaign, a very well-featured and widely used email and CRM platform. Channel integrated this into the website, styled the forms and created Email themes for Comset to message their clients and partners. It also has ready to use integrations with other popular platforms including Google Analytics, Stripe, Slack, Google Sheets, Amazon S3, Facebook, and dozens of other widely-used platforms.

The Results

The initial signs for the website are very promising with Google indexing all the pages within 3 days. The performance of the site is already very rapid, and with further optimisations still available.  With a GTmetrix performance score of 100% and every statistic coming in 'green' on the lighthouse report.

The Comset team with Channel’s support still has a lot of work to do. To rank the site well for the competitive key phrases in this market will take some excellent SEO work, and to drive the right kind of enquiries for Comset’s growth requires the ongoing creation of expert content, lead generation, whitepapers, and PPC campaigns to drive the right kind of visitors.

But the site is live, the go-live complete, and the marketing teams are ready to spring into action.