The Client

NanoCentral is an alliance of companies with the aim of accelerating the UK’s participation in micro-nano technology. NanoCentral brings nanotech suppliers and buyers together, promoting itself through tradeshows (which it organises) and via its website.

The Brief

The NanoCentral website needed a website redesign in order to make the most of new technologies to provide a more engaging experience to its users. The existing site was inflexible, offering a very static user experience and unable to accommodate the latest advances such as blogging and social media.

NanoCentral was aware that they needed to offer more of a two way conversation and have a website that they could update quickly and easily with the flexibility to change and adapt to future requirements.

The Solution

Key to the success of this project was choosing the correct CMS (Content Management System) and we knew that WordPress was more than capable of meeting the requirements. WordPress is a free, open source CMS that allowed us to easily provide blogging capabilities, social media integration and live video conferencing, all editable through an easy to use back end.

Several advanced features that we built into the site required custom building but the extensibility of WordPress made this task as painless as it could be:

Capability Matrix: A custom built advanced search of a complex database of service providers. The admin area allows NanoCentral to easily import its provider database into the system. This system was then replicated to offer an on-site job search.

Events Calendar: While several calendar plugins were available, none had the exact features required. We built our own with rollover popups linked through to the event page. This enables the promotion of many nanotechnology events from any page on the site without taking up too much space on screen.

RSS Feeds: In order to keep the site regularly updated with minimal effort, we built a system that can pull content from an editable list of RSS feeds which is converted into news posts. These news posts can then be approved and made live at the click of a button and are displayed seamlessly alongside news posts that Nano write themselves.

Live conference streaming: This tool enables Nano to screen their conferences live to international viewers who are not able to attend in person. These remote viewers can ask questions to a Nano Central representative, who in turn passes them onto the speaker on stage. This enables a real time conversation between remote viewers and the conference speakers.

Going Forward

In order to further promote their company, we also offered a range of online marketing options. We created two online Flash banner concepts which are used on various websites as well as on the NanoCentral site itself. We also designed an email newsletter template that reflects the brand identity and site design in a simplified form suitable for viewing in email clients.