System Dynamics designed a new corporate website for Element Six, and implemented the website together with a Content Management System (CMS) - Terminal 4 Site Manager.

The Challenge

With headquarters in Shannon and operations in 17 different countries, Element Six is the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of industrial diamonds and related products.

In January 2008 Element Six decided to redesign their corporate website completely, in line with a corporate restructuring exercise. At the same time Element Six wished to significantly improve the flexibility of their web-site, especially with respect to the ability to rapidly add and change site content, in line with their dynamic trading environment.

In March 2008, System Dynamics was engaged by Element Six to deliver the new website and its related Content Management System.

The Approach

A rapidly changing market meant that Element Six needed their new website to be fully operational in 8 weeks. All elements of the project were planned to deliver results extremely quickly, without compromising on quality.

System Dynamics initially worked with the corporate communications team and line business units to understand the target market and the website objectives. These initial workshops allowed us to quickly produce design prototypes and through a process of customer review fine tune these to final site design.

The project quickly progressed to development, and after a short period page design’s were converted to page templates and deployed into the Content Management System (CMS), Site Manager.

At this point Element Six were able to take control and commence content population, assisted by features in the CMS that allow preview of pages before they are deployed to the live website.

The Solution

The Element Six website and the CMS were implemented on hosted servers in a third party data centre. This approach ensures secure access to the CMS by all site contributors, regardless of whether they are on the corporate LAN or not.

The central infrastructure is scalable and allows deployment of additional sites or micro-sites as required, without incurring additional costs. Additionally this approach allows for sharing of content across site sections, or indeed across more than one site in the future.

The template driven approach, which separates design and content, allows for site redesign in future years with minimal effort.

The Benefits

The new website and content management system provides several features that are key to Element Six:

• A fresh new design enhanced the Element Six brand and attracted new customers to the site.
• The site and CMS are fully multilingual, supporting expansion into new markets and geographies.
• Site content can be generated by content owners anywhere in the world, using only a web browser and requiring no technical programming skills.
• The CMS provides full audit of content changes, including ability to view and audit pages that have been replaced or super-ceded over time.
• The CMS provides full support for workflow, whereby content can be created and site managers receive approval requests via their inbox, to prompt them to review and then release content to the live site.
• Using Site Manager the small Element Six communications team are able to create, add and archive content at will, and without reliance on IT or other technical skills.

Client Testimonial

John Caldwell, Head of Corporate Communications at Element Six, said “We selected System Dynamics because they demonstrated excellent capability to provide our website with a fresh new design, as well as an understanding of how we wanted to manage our website going forward. Terminal 4 Site Manager provided us with the tools to manage our site the way we wanted to, without having to rely on our local IT to create new site sections and so on. Finally System Dynamics had the scale and the project management skills to ensure delivery of our project on time, which was critical to our business units.