Arthur McLean

Background

Gresham Enterprise Storage is a small subsidiary of a larger Gresham family of companies. It focuses on serving the needs of enterprise-level companies that still rely on tape as a major piece of their backup strategy.

Challenge

The web site at the time was several years out of date and no longer reflected the branding that Gresham Enterprise Storage had switched to. Additionally, the web site was housed and managed by GES's parent company in the UK, and GES was not able to make changes and additions in a timely manor.

Solution

After researching several commercial and open source CMS solutions, I recommended that the company adopt SilverStripe. As a free solution, it had an extraordinarily robust and usable control panel that met all of GES's requirements. The development process was not as robust, but talented developers can usually overcome weaker tools.

Originally the plan had been to engage a designer to create the layout for the site based on the new marketing materials. During the process of creating the site architecture, I dashed off a sketch of what I thought might be an acceptable layout. It was created as a tool to help communicate some interactivity I was proposing for the site. Much to my surprise, as I have never claimed to be a designer, the CEO liked the sketch so much that he directed me to build out the site based on that layout. Thankfully we did engage a designer to produce graphics for the different sections of the site so the end product was not as sparse and text-heavy as it might have been.