My first experience of building a company website was 1994, for Oxford Molecular Group.  Fast forward to 2010 and I am amazed by the rich possibilities of using the internet to connect with your market.  And more interestingly the small price that you need to pay to acquire them.

At Biolauncher we have been working with revenue generating companies to help develop their commercial strategy. We have helped secure distribution deals, strategic partnerships, collaborative funding as well as deploy automated sales force management systems and e-marketing tools.  We also recognised the need to practise what we preach within Biolauncher.  The time had come to be more open about the wide range of our activities and talk about the success we have been building with our clients.

This new website was a key component of our new approach. Once our new corporate identity and website was designed by John McCarthy (www.actionidea.com), we faced the task of how to implement the site.  We were keen to use a content management tool to make updating the site easier and more manageable.  However quotes for proprietary hosted solutions seemed expensive and restrictive. Open source systems such as Joomla and Drupal were powerful, but required too much effort to set up in house and were over specified for our needs.

We turned to our network for advice – and we were soon on the right path.  A catch up meeting with an old colleague John Woods (www.linkdex.com) who is now active in Internet analytics and SEO technologies steered us towards Wordpresss.org and some useful links helped us understand the scope of the technology.  A conversation with Darika Ahrens (www.grapevine-consulting.com) social media expert and online branding experts pointed us at Elance (www.elance.com), an online procurement site which provides an escrow based contracting service and access to a global network of freelance experts.

So armed with a graphic specification we paid our $10 to join the club and uploaded our brief to Elance.  Within 15 minutes we had our first proposal.  By mid afternoon we had 25 costed proposals, all of whom were promising to deliver the site within three weeks. Bids came in from China, India, Uzbekistan, USA and UK ranging in cost from $600-$1,600.  We chose a developer based in Boston, MA based on his approach and his communication skills. We think David Nunez (www.davidnunez.com) did a great job and delivered the project 3 weeks faster than using a traditional approach.  Our total project saving was £2,000.

If you want to pick our brains, our networks or discuss the Elance approach, get in touch.  It costs nothing to start a conversation with us.