How “Simultaneous Collaboration” worked for Abacus

Arcaeon Design Studio (www.arcaeon.com) was chosen to provide a new website for Abacus, the industry body for Australian credit unions, building societies and friendly societies. The site was totally revamped and up and running in just three months. Arcaeon's director, Daniel de Lafoix, explained the benefits of his collective business model, with a flexible workforce and 24 hour production pipelines:

“We had developers working on building the site structure while designers simultaneously worked on layout, and our copywriter was taking care of adjusting all the existing content to address both a consumer and industry-level user. Tanya, our design manager, kept track of the copy drafts and approved layout mock-ups while proof-reading and supervising the migration of content from the existing Abacus site to our new 2.0 beta-site … it really was quite a seamless operation”.

Daniel explained that the website contained a number of interesting and challenging features that had not been used in the mutual sector previously and had not been accessible on its original website:

“The site is accessed and used by everyone from consumers to CEO's and Chairmen of mutual institutions across the country. One challenge was to ensure the copy, site layout and navigation catered to all these varying types of visitors without compromising or alienating any major group. Abacus are now able to update, expand and customise their site with complete ease and have better positioned themselves for communicating with their industry and consumers in a more effective way, utilising the best of web 2.0 innovations”.

After testing many customised features and systems, an easily updated and comprehensive searchable online directory was created for Abacus members that integrated directly with their CMS. It sorts and lists hundreds of mutuals according to a variety of variables, and draws from very specific information associated with a member listing, including branch postcodes, other trading names and acronyms.

For improved site navigation , the design allows users to drill-down to specific levels within the site, without having to go into a subpage - then a subpage after that, before getting the information they need. There is the ability, when navigating the whole site, for users to jump across multiple tiers and see every tier of the site from any page.

A set-and-forget email alert service was included in the new features. This is an automated service where users sign-up on the site and the CMS takes care of storing and sorting the subscribers. Users have access to email alerts that go out whenever new content is uploaded in two specific categories of the Abacus site. The emails have already been designed and laid out - all the Abacus staff have to do is merely load the content and save the new articles in a designated folder. It will automatically recognise the new content in those folders and send out an alert to subscribers with the title of the article, an excerpt of the content and direct link that clicks straight through to the page.

Arcaeon delivered the finished product on time and on budget. Dominic Dunn, the Head of Abacus Business Services, summed up: “... Abacus is proud to have Arcaeon Design Studio as a business partner. We've been delighted and impressed with the way Daniel and his team take the time to listen to our needs, share ideas and develop excellent finished products – always within the time-frames promised ...we highly recommend Arcaeon Design Studio”.

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