Web Design

The client

Harrow Council is the London borough local authority for Harrow in north-west London. In the mid-2000s, like every English council, it was under pressure to move services and business engagement onto digital channels as part of the government's national e-government programme.

We delivered Smart Connections as the design team at Agilisys, with Jonathan Porter leading brand and UX. Agilisys was already a major supplier to UK local government in this period, partnering with London boroughs on digital transformation and strategic IT (including joint ventures such as the H&F Bridge Partnership with Hammersmith & Fulham Council).

Smart Connections was Harrow's initiative beneath the council brand: a business network portal built for the borough's firms rather than its residents. Council capital planning for 2005–08 records a Business Portal (phase 2) under the corporate Business Connections programme, budgeted to support the local business community alongside wider e-government web investment. The delivered product brand was Smart Connections, carrying the strapline Harrow Means Business.

The challenge

Central government had brought forward the deadline for e-enabled public services to 31 December 2005. Councils reported progress through Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) returns and Priority Service Outcomes; the average authority claimed around 97% e-enablement by the deadline, though the bar for what counted as "online" was often modest.

For Harrow, the harder problem was not a single transactional form but business-facing services: helping local companies discover council contracts, connect with other suppliers, find support for starting or growing a business, and see Harrow as a place to trade. That needed a named programme, a credible brand, and a web application people would actually use, not a generic council subsite buried three clicks deep.

What we did

Agilisys built the application back end, and Jonathan Porter led brand, UX and front-end for Smart Connections:

• Brand definition workshops and brand identity: the SmartConnections marque

(orange-to-grey wordmark) and Harrow Means Business strapline, applied across portal and campaign materials.

• Web application design and front-end: the business network portal structure, including

sections for Doing Business with Harrow Council and Business Services & Support, with navigation for paths such as starting a business and running a business in the borough.

• Marketing: launch and promotion support for the initiative.

Our approach

We treated Smart Connections as a product brand sitting under Harrow Council, not as anonymous council web styling. Workshops came first to define what the programme stood for, then identity, UX and front-end were developed together so the portal felt like a genuine business network, aligned with the borough's Business Connections goals and the era's push to put council services online.

Outcome

Smart Connections went live as the first Harrow business-network site from the original digital strategy Agilisys developed for the council: brand, UX, front-end and marketing on Agilisys's application platform, at the height of the UK local e-government drive.

What happened next: the strategic line the programme set continued long after the product name retired. Smart Connections was the first site; the council's supply-chain portal today runs as **Harrow Network on CompeteFor (business directory, tender alerts, local procurement), delivered by BiP Solutions. Current Harrow business pages also point to Supply Ready Harrow, the Harrow Business Portal and the London Tenders Portal** for larger contracts: an evolution of the original Agilisys programme rather than a live continuation of the Smart Connections product name.

Context & coverage

This sits in a wave of Agilisys local-government work in London: strategic partnerships, shared-service models and citizen- and business-facing digital products as councils met e-government targets and then deepened what "online" meant.

• Local eGovernment (Wikipedia): Blair's 2005

e-enablement target, IEG statements and the reported 97% council compliance figure.

• Town halls manage to e-enable 97% of services (Public Finance, 2006):

contemporary reporting on councils meeting the ODPM deadline.

• Harrow Council Cabinet papers, 17 February 2005:

capital programme 2005/06–2007/08 including Business Connections / Business Portal (phase 2, to support the business community) and web investment to meet e-government targets.

• Agilisys (Wikipedia): Agilisys's public-sector

focus and London borough partnerships, including the H&F Bridge Partnership model.

• Harrow Council on CompeteFor (Harrow Network): today's

supply chain portal (business directory, tender opportunities).

• About Harrow Network (CompeteFor):

council procurement and business-directory positioning.

Related portfolio (separate brief): `public-private-partnership` (Hammersmith & Fulham Council / Agilisys, press advertising, 2004) is the other London borough entry from this agency era in the archive.

Client: McDonalds

Agency: Agilisys

Art Direction: Jonathan Porter

Project Scope: Web Design &flash microsite development

View more design for McDonald’s

The client

Hammersmith & Fulham is a London borough local authority. From May 2004, the council ran an Incremental Strategic Partnership with Agilisys to modernise how it delivered services. That relationship matured into the h&f Bridge Partnership: formally approved in July 2006 as London's first major local government joint venture, a £120 million ten-year contract to transform IT and citizen services.

The brand most people will recognise in civic terms is Hammersmith & Fulham Council. Agilisys was the delivery partner. Jonathan Porter art directed the brand development and press advertising that introduced the partnership to residents and stakeholders in 2004, before the joint venture company went live.

The challenge

Public-private partnerships live or die on trust. Hammersmith & Fulham needed to explain why a council was linking arms with a technology supplier, what residents would gain, and how savings would flow back into services, without sounding like a faceless outsourcing deal. That needed a clear visual identity and press campaign, not just a contract announcement buried in committee papers.

What we did

Brand development and press advertising for the Hammersmith & Fulham / Agilisys partnership: the identity and campaign materials that carried the story to the borough's audience while the strategic partnership was bedding in.

Our approach

Treat the partnership as a named programme with its own brand, not a logo slapped on existing council stationery. Press advertising had to work for residents scanning a local paper, councillors defending the model, and other boroughs watching whether London's first major JV would stick.

Outcome

The creative work supported a partnership that the council's leader publicly endorsed as the natural next step after two years of delivery. By 2006 the h&f Bridge Partnership was setting up a Centre of Excellence in Hammersmith to share services across London's public sector, with a £13.5 million transformation programme behind three resident-facing brands: h&f Express (transactional services), h&f community services (social care, benefits, housing) and h&f Direct (contact centre). Roughly 140 council staff transferred into the joint venture company alongside Agilisys teams.

Context & coverage

This sits in the Gershon efficiency era, when UK local government was under pressure to cut cost without cutting service. Hammersmith & Fulham's model paralleled Agilisys's Impact Partnership in Rochdale: a centre of excellence that could eventually serve neighbouring authorities. The borough had visited other Agilisys public-sector clients before signing, a public endorsement of delivery quality that made the JV possible.

• Agilisys (Wikipedia): public-sector focus and London borough partnerships.
• Related portfolio: `smart-connections` (Harrow Council business portal, same agency era).

The client

Yell was the directories business behind Yellow Pages, one of the most recognisable brands in Britain. Its core promise, helping people find the right local business, was moving online, and the web experience had to earn that promise on its own terms. We worked with Yell during our agency era at Agilisys.

The challenge

A directory lives or dies on speed. If finding the right plumber, restaurant or locksmith takes more than a few moments, people go elsewhere. The brief was to put the existing experience in front of real users, find out where it fell short, and design concepts for something better, built around how people actually search online rather than how the print product was organised.

What we did

We ran usability testing on Yell's existing experience and turned the findings into concept designs, drawing on the dedicated usability lab at our Hammersmith studio to watch real users work through real tasks.

Our approach

Evidence before aesthetics. We tested with users first, let the findings expose where the experience was failing them, then designed concepts to answer those specific problems. Designing first and validating later would have been faster; it would also have been guesswork.

Outcome

Yell came away with grounded usability findings and design concepts to match: an evidence-led view of how a national directory brand could work harder for its users online.

Context & coverage

Yell ran Yellow Pages and Yell.com, the UK's main business-directory properties of the era. The brand later faded as search engines absorbed the "find a local business" need, which makes this an interesting snapshot of a directory business trying to adapt to the web.

The client

VisitBritain is the national tourism agency that sells Britain to the world. Selling a country is not a one-website job. It takes a network of localised sites for different countries, languages and scripts, all hanging off a common spine so the brand reads the same in Seoul as it does in São Paulo.

NetDecisions, the firm that became Agilisys, won the VisitBritain redevelopment in what the trade press of the time called one of the most lucrative new-media contracts of the year: a deal worth around £500,000. The British Tourist Authority chose us from a field of 320 agencies that responded to its brief, invited twelve to tender, and shortlisted four for the final selection: JKD, Wheel, the incumbent Euro RSCG Circle, and NetDecisions. The timing mattered too. The BTA was rebranding to VisitBritain following its merger with the English Tourism Council, so this was the first digital expression of a brand new national identity. We built the technical background and the core framework for all of VisitBritain's sites, including the global versions, with Jonathan as the lead designer on the content management strategy and the internationalisation templates.

The challenge

The BTA was running around forty sites promoting Britain abroad, and wanted them overhauled and pushed into new markets, including China, Poland, Russia and South Korea. It had invested heavily in new back-end systems, a Tridion content management system and Autonomy search, and needed a design and build that could make those investments pay. Online travel brochures, holiday and itinerary planners, and increased personalisation were all on the brief. The real problem was never a page. It was a system: templates and a content model robust enough to carry dozens of languages and writing directions, including right-to-left scripts, power all of those features, and keep scaling as personalisation grew, all from one core framework.

What we did

We designed the content management strategy and the internationalisation templates for the entire VisitBritain network: the template system and content structure that let a single core framework drive around forty localised sites across countries and languages. Everything integrated with the client's Tridion CMS and Autonomy search, and everything supported right-to-left and bidirectional text as first-class citizens, not afterthoughts.

Our approach

Design the system once so it localises cleanly everywhere. We built the templates and content model for translation and for different scripts from day one, rather than shipping a single English site and retrofitting it market by market, and we built it all to work hand in glove with the back-end platforms the client had already chosen.

Outcome

The initial build of VisitBritain's global localisation network: a content framework and template system designed to scale across around forty markets and languages, and to seed new sites in markets such as China, Poland, Russia and South Korea. Phillip Smith, VisitBritain project manager at the British Tourist Authority, described why the work was awarded to us:

All four shortlisted agencies could have delivered the job. The work went to NetDecisions because we offered the most interesting proposal, bringing added extras to the table the others did not.

Awards & recognition

The VisitBritain website was recognised internationally during the period of this work. At the World Travel Awards, VisitBritain was named World's Leading Tourism Authority Website across the mid-2000s, the years spanning the build.

Later VisitBritain.com honours, including a 2010 Web Marketing Association WebAward and a 2011 Webby Awards honoree listing, relate to a subsequent redesign rather than this initial build, so we do not claim them here.

Context & coverage

VisitBritain was a brand new organisation when we did this work. It was created on 1 April 2003 from the merger of the British Tourist Authority and the English Tourism Council, with a remit to market Britain to the world and develop the visitor economy at home. Our work was the initial build of its global, localised web presence under a single new identity, a formative moment rather than a routine refresh.

• VisitBritain (Wikipedia) and VisitBritain: our history: formation in April 2003 from the BTA and English Tourism Council merger.