+ Objectives
Thomas Hardie approached K2L in need of the full marketing mix, in order to showcase their huge offering to a global target market. This would include web design, PR, content marketing plus print in the form of brochures. Thomas Hardie also needed a new Intranet site, in order to better connect more than 300 staff working across their locations. Initial objectives for this project included;
- Design and build a content-managed Intranet site to be used as a communications tool for staff and managers at Thomas Hardie
- Ensure the site was fully responsive across all platforms and devices
- Ensure site was initiative and easy-to-use for the Thomas Hardie team, providing a streamlined and effective user experience
+ The Challenge
The design and build of the Intranet site would throw up several challenges, the main being it needed to be extremely intuitive and straightforward to use, as it would be fully content-managed internally by the Thomas Hardie team. This Intranet site would have many features, including general forms and information for both managers and employees, a staff directory, individual depot profiles, an archive for press releases plus a health and safety and news section. It would prove to be a challenge in itself to include all of these and make them simple enough for a non-tech-savvy user to update!
+ Our Strategy
Our web design and development team began the project the only way we could – by getting to know the Thomas Hardie team through their appointed representatives and learning about their needs. Obviously with a team of more than 300, our web developers would base most of their work on well-researched key personas, and these helped us to determine the functionalities that would be useful for the website. These would include three different user levels (admin, manager, user) and a separate log in for each user. There would also be automatic access for selected IP addresses, to make for a more streamlined user experience.
The finished result was a clean, contemporary site that incorporated the Thomas Hardie branding. It would work well to mirror the Thomas Hardie eCommerce website that would display trucks online in an organised, easy-to-navigate manner, so customers can browse quickly and efficiently. The two projects worked well alongside the rest of the marketing materials we had created, including a long-form printed brochure that would showcase the company’s large offering.
