At the start of April 2024, having absorbed the key functions previously held by the county’s two Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), Surrey County Council became solely responsible for driving sustainable economic growth across the whole of the county. As a result, the Council is required to provide business support through a new Surrey-wide Growth Hub and deliver government-funded programmes focused on skills.
Akiko Design was selected by Surrey County Council to design and develop a new business-facing website to act as a gateway to support, advice and information for businesses across Surrey.
I cannot thank and praise the team at Akiko enough for their work in developing a new business-facing website for Surrey.
From pitch to pressing the go live button, the team showed a high level of professionalism and understanding of the brief to deliver a top-quality product on time and to budget.
They were incredibly responsive and understanding to some of the challenges we faced. Nothing seemed to be too much of an ask. They continuously went the ‘extra mile’ to support us in a very fast-paced and complex journey. Perhaps most importantly, they are also lovely people to work with.
I look forward to continuing working with them now we are live and would wholeheartedly recommend the team for future projects.
Tim Ridgway
Strategic Marketing Manager, Surrey County Council
PROJECT DELIVERABLES
- Project management
- Wireframing
- Responsive website design
- Website development using WordPress
- Custom block development
- WordPress and Evolutive integration
- AA level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Ongoing support and maintenance
- Hosting
Key features of the Business Surrey website include:
- An advice and support section containing information on accessing funding; talent, recruitment and apprenticeships; starting a business; and innovation and technology.
- A detailed and searchable support directory that enables users to filter by national, regional and local schemes, as well as support type, and pin-point services within a specified radius of their location.
- A listing for events and networking opportunities with a ‘Submit an event’ form that allows organisations to include their own events once approved and published by the Business Surrey team.
- A news section where users can also sign up to email newsletters specifying the topics they are interested in.
- A document library that allows those involved in meetings and events to submit documentation such as minutes, agendas and presentations via a front-end form.
Part of our brief was to enable the Business Surrey team to quickly create new content that is always consistent, on brand and fully responsive. We achieved this by creating a suite of custom blocks that Akiko’s team of developers built from scratch.
The new blocks are visually editable, page building tools that are extremely flexible and easy to use when creating new webpages and posts.
Following a training session run by Akiko, the Business Surrey team were able to take control of their own content generation.
As part of this project we also drew on our extensive experience of integrating with third party software, such as Salesforce and Hubspot, in order to integrate the various WordPress forms with an Evolutive CRM system.
The submitted form data is pushed into the CRM system via an API web service. This required Akiko to map all the corresponding fields and format the XML output in order for Evolutive to accept the incoming information.
It is essential that the Business Surrey website meets the AA level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This is the international standard for accessible websites and content and means that users are able to:
- Change colours, contrast levels and fonts.
- Zoom in up to 400% without the text spilling off the screen.
- Navigate most of the website using just a keyboard or speech recognition software.
- Listen to most of the website using a screen reader.
We are proud to have developed a slick new website for Business Surrey that is accessible to as many people as possible. We are now looking forward to supporting Surrey County Council as it continues in its mission to promote sustainable economic growth for the county as a whole.
