Do-it-yourselfers
Western Financial Group wanted to rebrand its Web presence to reflect growth not only in its territory but also in its range of financial services. Formerly Hi-Alta Capital, the company operates a network of insurance agencies and is expanding its services to include investments and agency banking. It has more than 140,000 customers throughout British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada.
"When we looked at the implications of branding on the Web, many of our local branch offices had their own Web sites in addition to our corporate Web site," says Donna Abramson, IT manager for Western Financial Group. "The local branch Web sites lacked our corporate identity. We needed to extend our corporate brand down to the local level without losing the local flavor of these sites, in addition to rebranding our corporate site."
In tackling the rebranding project, the company wanted to stay true to its philosophy of running a streamlined operation. "We try to keep the head office as small as possible," Abramson explains. "We don't have a huge IT staff, and we tend not to hire highly focused specialists. For example, we don't have a Webmaster, and we don't host our own site."
Consequently, the ideal solution would allow non-technical professionals to become content authors without having to be Web programmers. It also would adapt existing Web content by applying a new corporate look to it. Time and resource constraints made it impractical to build new Web sites.
The Web content management choices that were available to Western Financial Group were: licensing and implementing Web content management software, outsourcing the content management function, or subscribing to Web content management as a Web service. Western Financial Group chose the third option, engaging the Web services of iUpload.
iUpload offers Web content management as a subscription-based service, and does not require installing new software or infrastructure changes. Also, non-technical users can author, publish and edit content directly to a Web site in a secure environment.
With the new solution, Abramson says, "we can make whatever changes we need on a go-forward basis. In any service-based business, timeliness is critical. If there is a site change we want to make, it is done in a matter of minutes."