This document has been written following a meeting between Ed Ross and Tim Joyce of HOOP and Leo Lewis of Finsbury Ltd, a major City based financial public relations company.
The document has been revised following a second meeting between Ed Ross and Leo Lewis at Finsbury Ltd on Tuesday 23/03/1999
The document has been revised following a telephone conversation between Leo Lewis and Time Joyce on 08/04/1999.
Because of their status and the industry they are in, Finsbury require an innovative and stylish design ("clean, cool and corporate"). Following a meeting over a year ago, a site design was produced by Keyhaven International, but it was never officially launched or marketed. Finsbury are now eager to provide a functional and interesting site to a clearly defined user base consisting of existing clients, potential clients, the financial press and potential high-grade employees.
Many of the pages have a messageboard as a key component. This is designed to encourage interactivity from all users of the site. The messageboards will be built on a database, allowing them to be searched, and easily maintained.
This page will feature the Finsbury Logo. It will have a navigation bar allowing access to all areas of the site. The home page will briefly introduce the company and describe the main areas of the site. This page will be visually appealing and quick to download in order to 'hook' the user's imagination and interest.
The menu will provide links to the following pages. The names for the buttons have not yet been finalized.
This page will introduce Finsbury describe the services Finsbury offer. It will contain a history of the company and generally establish the company's credentials. It will probably also include profiles of the four Finsbury directors. The description of the services will be kept brief, and potential clients will be encouraged to get in touch with Finsbury to arrange an initial meeting.
This page will profile all of Finsbury's clients, allowing journalists to get to key PR information. For each client, we propose to make available the following information and services:
This page will give password protected access for Finsbury's clients to their own private area. Within the private area, clients will be have access to the following facilities (in addition to those supplied on the public Clients page, above):
This area is designed to provide a one stop resource for Account Exec / Client interaction. More facilities will be added as the value of this section is realized.
The page is designed to facilitate better communications with the press. Members of the press will be able to sign up to receive press releases via email. The service will be customizable for each member of the press, they will be able to select which of Finsbury's clients they are interested in, and then only receive information about these clients. Additionally, journalists will be able to sign up for the following Finsbury News services:
A profile will be created for each journalist who signs up, which will allow Finsbury to track their use of the site, and the journalist to change their profile at any time (in order to add new clients to the news subscription service, for example).
Having considered this page, it has been decided to simply include profiles of the directors under the Corporate Profile section.
This page will give details about Finsbury that are of particular interest to recent graduates.
To encourage graduates to contact Finsbury, short profiles of 3 recently recruited graduates will appear on this page. Interested students will then be able to make contact in order to ask informal questions about Finsbury.
The page will have a short form where graduates can fill out their details. These inquires can then be kept on file for use when Finsbury are recruiting. An email address will also be given to allow CVs to be sent in.
This page will allow visitors to contact Finsbury in a number of ways;
Additionally, we will encourage visitors to sign up to the Finsbury mailing lists, where they can be kept informed about particular customers or subject areas. This will be achieved by linking to the Press page.
Due the sophisticated back-end requirements associated with the type of database and template technology employed to build this site, a specialist server will be required to host it. Although Finsbury have already purchased web space with a UK based ISP, we will be purchasing server space is the States through a UK ISP. This will provide better quality and lower running costs than other options considered.
Finsbury will use the domain name www.finsbury.com, which has already been registered.
Online promotion can be broken down into 3 areas:
Online promotion is a complex area, so Hoop will provide a specialist consultant to advise Finsbury before a potential campaign is undertaken.
This is all about encouraging links to the site from people who might find the site useful. The promotion is generally carried out on an ongoing basis via email and newsgroup posting. Broadly it involves networking with customers and companies in related businesses.
An essential first step in online promotion is to get the site registered with search engines, therefore Hoop propose an initial search engine 'push'. This involves the following:
The bulk submission, whilst great in principal, tends not to produce great results, mainly because the search engines covered do not themselves generate much traffic. Additionally bulk submission software is far from perfect.
Banner Advertising, although expensive, can achieve good results when targeted correctly. It involves buying advertising space on other websites where a banner can be displayed. An alternative mechanism is a process called banner exchange, this involves putting banners on your site in exchange for banners appearing on other peoples sites. Banner exchange does not tend to be very effective for 2 reasons; you loose about twice as many people from your site as visit you through the exchange, and the visitors you get tend not to be well qualified.
A banner campaign will be considered and costed against other promotional activities.
It is not anticipated that the Finsbury site will need very much maintenance. The key dynamic areas of the site, are the messageboards. These are driven by databases, and do not therefore need maintenance (apart from monitoring and removing of offending messages).
If more significant changes are required, such as adding new members of staff, HOOP will make these on an ad-hoc basis.
All costs given here are provisional, exclusive of VAT and valid for a period of 90 days. The payment schedule is as follows.
| Commitment to project | 25% |
| Signoff of initial graphic design | 25% |
| Completion and Launch | 50% |
| Task | Estimate (hours) |
| Pre sales consultancy, preparation of proposal and agreement of costs. | 8 |
| Initial Graphic Design (and agreement) | 25 |
| Home Page | 10 |
| Profile | 12 |
| Services | 4 |
| Setup of Database | 8 |
| Database Administration interface | 8 |
| Messageboard facility | 16 |
| Clients page (20 clients) | 25 |
| Clients only (20 clients) | 20 |
| Press Centre | 10 |
| Email list facility | 12 |
| Recruitment | 10 |
| Contact Us | 7 |
| Review of Site and sign-off | 15 |
| Total | 190 |
HOOP charge £55 per hour for Web Site development, giving a total cost for building the site of £10,450.
Hosting will cost £500 per annum. HOOP will coordinate the process of purchasing web space, but fees will be payable by Finsbury directly to the ISP.
Initial Search Engine push - as described in section 3.3.2 - £1000.
HOOP are very keen to take on this project and are ready to start as soon as the go-ahead is given. It is anticipated that the site can be built in 8 weeks from start to launch.
The project will be developed online. This gives Finsbury staff the ability to monitor progress on a day-to-day basis.
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Dated: Fri Jan 15 11:07:00 1999
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