IN'n'OUT - EMS website

Brief:

IN'n'OUT are a recently launched chain of car servicing and MOT centres, dedicated to satisfying the customer by providing a swift and good value service, a clean, comfortable waiting environment and well trained, friendly staff. The company already operates 5 centers and is planning for 300 centres across the UK with a current role-out approaching two per month.

To support IN'n'OUT's ongoing expansion, Karbon Creative were chosen to design and develop an attractive, comprehensive website; a key tool for providing information to potential customers and building brand awareness. With the company seeking an IPO over the next 18 months the new website was required to showcase the companies centre roll-out and expansion program as well as integrate closely with the rapidly growing consumer base.

The new site was to be future proof, with the ability to roll-out it's development in phases. The back-end system must integrate with existing, in-centre technology and provide a secure customer portal for sensitive account information. By using the AIR Enterprise Management System (EMS) we could be sure that the site would be easy to navigate and be usable by personnel without the benefit of any web programming experience.

We also embed Google Analytics for in-depth reporting and established a Google Adwords campaign.

Results:

The IN'n'OUT home page
The flexible modular nature of AIR allowed Karbon to provide exactly the facilities that were required, without the system being bloated and complicated by features that would never be used.

Centred around the customer
IN'n'OUT have a handful of service/MOT centres already open, and will have many more opening throughout 2009. As a fairly new business, clearly it's very important to provide as much information as possible about these centres to potential customers; primarily their locations, and what a motorist can expect when visiting a particular centre. However, due to the constantly changing details of which centres are already open for business, which are opening soon, plus any more that may be in development, along with the varying services available, a set of static pages about each centre would not have sufficed.

AIR can provide a powerful CMS which allows users to add and edit their own pages, but for simplicity and in order to ensure a consistent page layout, Karbon developed a new back-end facility called Centres.

The Centres facility stores details of every IN'n'OUT centre in the UK, and the details of any centre can be updated, or a new centre can be added, by filling in a simple form. Information that can be recorded for each centre includes:

* Name
* Description
* Opening hours
* Available services
* Testimonials
* Images (slideshow if multiple provided)
* Location (Google maps for directions)
* Manager's name, photo and comment
* Contact Information

All centres use the same layout template to ensure a consistent style of presentation, and the template is designed so that no matter how much or how little information is entered about a particular centre, the page will still be displayed in a tidy, professional manner. If a centre is being built but is not ready to be shown to the public yet, a centre entry can be created but left in draft status, which means that it will not be visible on the website. When the time is right, the entry can simply be changed to active in order to display the centre page. It is also possible to flag a particular centre as Opening soon, when entering details about the centre.

This allows website visitors an early look at the information page about the centre, and lets them know when the centre will be available to visit. Centres that are flagged as Opening soon are also marked with an asterisk in the centre list, so that website visitors can recognise their status at a glance.

Valuable information
Another facility developed for AIR at the request of IN'n'OUT (but which could now be implemented into any AIR system) was the ability to poll website visitors on any number of topics. In a similar manner to the Centre facility, polls can easily be managed within the back-end of the AIR system. Anyone with the necessary permission may add a poll, entering a question to be asked to website visitors.

Visitors can be allowed to give only a single answer, multiple answers, or even to enter their own response. Answer choices can be defined, and a related image added if desired. Finally each poll can be set to Open or Closed, with only Open polls able to be voted on by visitors. A date can also be entered on which a poll will automatically become closed.

A number of polls can be set up in this way. IN'n'OUT wanted a single poll to appear at a time, so one poll from the back-end list must be set to Selected in order for it to appear on the website. Selecting one poll automatically deselects all others. Once a number of visitors have voted, their responses appear on the site in graphical form; ususally a bar graph. IP address checking prevents any one visitor from voting multiple times and swaying the results unnaturally.

The back-end of the AIR system allows IN'n'OUT to view the results of any poll, whether currently running or not. This displays a pie chart which quickly highlights the main pattern of the results, and below it are the statistics for the exact number of votes each answer received, and the results for each answer as a percentage of the overall total.

Conclusion
Karbon's AIR web framework is a perfect match for the online needs of a new, rapidly developing company such as IN'n'OUT. With any page being content-editable in a visual environment, practically any text or image on the website can be changed in a moment. The ever expanding line-up of service centres is comprehensively represented, again with the power to be updated as quickly as details can change in the running of a young, ambitious business. News articles are also valuable when your business is constantly developing, and these are catered for by the popular News facility available for AIR. This allows news articles to be created in a straight forward format, with images if desired, the latest articles constantly displayed on the home page.

In summary, Karbon established a project management program to manage each of the contracted parties required to implement the fundamental and interactive connections with pre-existing technologies. Technologies that would form the basis of the customer portals and thus enable customers to see their invoice history and account activity.

We then created a series of designs that not only adhered to existing brand guidelines but also enhanced and enforced them - creating instant familiarity with existing printed marketing collateral. As part of this process we established a set of design parameters that would form the backbone of the site in terms of the EMS interface - ensuring continuity, regardless of who was performing content updates.

We then implemented a Google Maps API, creating an interactive mapping field that would show existing and forthcoming retail centres as well as provide accurate driving directions from any point in the UK.

The new site went live on time and on budget.

You can visit the website by clicking: here