Seacon design and manufacture undersea connectors used for connecting the many undersea pipelines responsible for internet connectivity across the globe. They are a worldwide corporation headquartered in the USA and in 2010 we worked with the Seacon Europe Ltd. management team in Great Yarmouth to develop the new WordPress website for the multi-national corporation. Seacon’s underwater connector products are built to very specific technical requirements which meant they were realistically unable to offer a retail service for their products at the time. However we built the website with background ecommerce functionality for if they are able to work out a process for detailing the technical specifications during the order process.
The Seacon website content includes over 100 different pages in total, some general information pages on the types of services they provide and more than 50 products, each featuring a description, HD product image and a list up to 30 downloadable PDF files detailing the technical details and options for each product. The contact us page featured a state of the art interactive HTML5 map showing all Seacon and their partner companies locations on the world map which were linked to the relevant contact information. In addition to all of this the website included dynamic SEO friendly lists of both company news and their upcoming exhibition events.
Their website had extensive content requirements most of it had to be imported to WordPress manually from their existing website which was originally created using static HTML files in 2008 by a different web design company. WordPress revolutionised the management team’s process for updating content as previously the content updates had to be done by the web design company for a significant fee, however with WordPress they are able to add or update any and all of their content at no cost and without requiring the services of the web developer. In addition to this we modernised the design and coding to provide semantic structure and updated to HTML5 standards, a technology that was still in experimental phases at the time.
During the years 2010 – 2012 we met frequently with Seacon management staff in Great Yarmouth and in later years we added new features to the website, this included a secure PDF document management system featuring an internal back end login system for their staff built in to WordPress where the staff could log in to contribute or download existing PDF documents associated with various different products and categories. In addition to this in 2012 we added marketing features for the website for promoting their new physical product catalog DVD and the accompanying request form for this.
As a worldwide company the website received worldwide traffic, a significant amount of it with Seacon staff, potential clients and other interested parties from all over the world, add to that an impressive marketing budget and you have a high volume of daily traffic hitting the website. The website hosting was our responsibility to manage for several years and global traffic is notoriously difficult to handle efficiently due to network latency and because of this we had to implement advanced hosting techniques directly in development WordPress with use of a global array of servers commonly referred to as a CDN or content delivery network at around the time this was becoming a viable technology, but before the time WordPress or anyone but high end hosting providers had implemented a solid solution for this type of content delivery.
