Beer & Young Corporate Website Design & Development

Beer&Young are the UK’s leading provider of private investor and business angel funding for small businesses. They have one of the longest and most successful track records across the UK for raising capital from private investors and year on year they raise more capital from their network for more clients than any of their competition.

Challenge

When we met Beer&Young their site was experiencing server errors, was down for considerable amounts of time and had become a serious pain point for the business. The site had not been updated for many years. It looked dated and did not reflect the brand’s position as a leader in their industry. Moreover the WordPress platform used  had limited functionality, was open to attack, and staff struggled to manage and publish with it, which led to a loss of valuable time. An easier solution was needed. And one that would work without fault on mobile devices to help visitors connect wherever they may be.

Thinking

The budget was not large and the features and results required were considerable. We collaborated with Beer&Young’s marketing department to get the most out of the project budget. By spreading the load, B&Y could concentrate on creating content, leaving us to develop the design and infrastructure of the build.

Beer&Young provided an outline sitemap, some basic wireframes, and plenty of examples to draw inspiration from. This work helped us create a detailed prototype beta site which was tested by Beer&Young'’s team extensively before we moved on to the design of the user interface. And, while we worked on the development of the site, Beer&Young commissioned photography from one of our carefully selected 'guests' and began writing new content. This collaboritive approach meant that once the development link was ready, they were able to start populating the website. By the time the site launched, the team were already fluent in the new CMS. 

Result

Beer&Young are really happy with their new site and excited that their clients and prospects have a better way of engaging with their brand online. The new site engages investors like never before. The new design makes it easy for businesses to seek funding and for investors to search for opportunities by funnelling them through eye-catching feature tiles. 

New deal completions and other company news items are highlighted on the homepage and other key pages to help visitors stay informed about their many success stories and strengthen the brand’s credibility. Navigation is simple and uncluttered, providing greater usability. The whole site is optimised for mobile and tablet devices to help any business or investor access the site from any device. The CMS enables them to publish multi-purpose content in a single operation. An 'opportunity' post is created once with all of the required information. This is programatically divided so that only a segment is viewable to the public while full details can be accessed by registered investors. 

Registration to become an investor is streamlined using the least amounts of steps necessary. Investors can customize the type of opportunity they are interested in helping Beer&Young segment their audience and provide them with better targeted, relevant and meaningful information. The site tracks published opportunities and tells an Associate when an opportunity is viewed, helping B&Y gauge interest in an opportunity and direct the right help with an appropriate follow-up.

Note

Over the last ten years we have heard many tales of frustration with WordPress. So we resolved to build a CMS which alleviated these pain points. Embark is based on a Python code base. The same technology Amazon, Google and Disney use to power their sites. It is not dependent on plugins that can cause outages or security weak-links. Embark is geared for usability, admininstrators can easily edit on the front-end of a live site, seeing the changes as they make them. Embark is cloud hosted with automatic resource allocation enabling extra hosting servers to spin up as traffic to the site does, providing a far higher level of stability than with a dedicated server.