EIBS, the website content management specialists have just completed a unique site for designer-makers in the East London area and beyond.
The new website will also enable new Hidden Art Franchisees to run their own website, linked to the Hidden Art home page. Early in 2005 the first regional pilot franchise intends to launch its own site. In London, Hidden Art is starting to expand beyond its East London remit, to enable London wide designer-makers to benefit. The networked community of designer-makers is as a result, dramatically increasing.
Mazorca Projects, trading as ‘Hidden Art’, is a not for profit company which showcases and promotes the work of designer-makers. The network now encompasses 1,800 businesses and builds links between the creative and manufacturing industries and their clients.
The new Hidden Art website – www.hiddenart.com, includes a comprehensive directory of manufacturers designer-makers of products such as ceramics, fashion accessories, furniture, glass, lighting and textiles. It also provides resources for franchisee companies and will enable them to run their own website, linked to the Hidden Art home page.
Hidden Art’s old website only allowed for the basic adding of new content to the site. However, as the company grew, it became clear that the web technology was holding back the development of the site, as there was no way to alter the structure to create new areas, add additional databases or manage the thousands of images on the site in an organised way.
A number of content management systems were evaluated by Hidden Art and EIBS’s ‘EasySite’ was chosen.
“We chose EasySite for a number of reasons,” said Michael Hannah (Fiona Sibley) from Mazorca Projects. “We were very impressed by the degree to which EIBS understood and responded to our requirements.
They approached the project in a straightforward manner and were able to grasp the complexity of the Hidden Art message and the diversity of the audiences that the site needed to address.
“EasySite has proved to be an effective solution to our web needs. The text editing facilities are sound and more than adequate for our needs and we also like the ease with which we can create and arrange new pages and entire sections and sub-sections. We have also begun to appreciate some of the less obvious features that enhance the flexibility such as being able to copy and relocate whole branches of the site and the ability to share content between sections.
“As a design based company, we also have particular needs in the management of images and the new Asset Manager module is proving to be highly effective in achieving this. Also, with the large membership base that we have, being able to set up permissions and providing access rights to various pages and functions is vital.”
EIBS developed the first version of the EasySite content management system in 1999 and since then it has been adopted by organisations in a variety of sectors, including local government, education, health and private industry.
Bruce Groves from EIBS believes that EasySite is also ideally suited to membership-based networks such as Hidden Art. “EasySite is ideal for anyone that needs a scalable and flexible website,” said Bruce. “Over the years, we have continually developed EasySite, adding new features to the system, based upon the feedback received from clients. As a result, we now have three distinct versions of the system – EasySite Lite, Enterprise and Community. Each has been designed to meet the needs of different organisations depending upon their size and the type of functionality required. EasySite Community is ideal for networks like Hidden Art because it caters for unlimited users and multiple partner websites. EasySite also meets the latest standards for ‘accessibility’ under the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act.”
The Hidden Art website is proving to be very popular with members, who are using it not only to share and access information but also to trade with each other. Sally Wakelin a jewellery maker added:
“The Hidden Art website is an amazing resource for designer makers as well as anyone else interested in creative design. Working mostly on my own, using the website helps me to find out about other designers and opportunities and makes me feel part of a community.”
www.hiddenart.com
