by Sali Earls
Cardiff based Eazyweb is an award-winning web design company, that has been providing business websites since 1996. As well as offering a custom development service, the company specialise in packaged solutions that offer a low cost, yet flexible opportunity for small businesses.
Eazyweb recently made the news when they opened a satellite office in Sydney, Australia, taking the opportunity to seize a gap in the web development market there, and provide round the clock support for customers.
Sali Earls spoke to Eazyweb Managing Director, Andy Thwaites, to find out more about the company.
What's the history of your company?
Eazyweb was established in Cardiff in 1996 to offer a professional, out-sourced web consultancy service to (primarily) larger public organisations. Back then, there were only a couple of companies
involved with web and multimedia development in Cardiff. It was quite basic stuff - floppy disk based presentations (no widespread use of CDs then!) and purely static HTML sites.
Originally catering just to Welsh organisations, Eazyweb soon began tendering for - and winning - projects right across the UK. Since that time the company has grown to supply a variety of associated e-services in both the public and private sectors, across the UK, Europe, the USA and Australasia.
Our projects run the complete range from small, e-commerce business websites, right up to large public organisation clients.
With the opening of our Asia-Pacific satellite office we now have a base for providing our unique CMS tools to a truly worldwide audience. It allows us to provide out-of-hours Support and benefit from extended development cycles.
What unique products/services does your company provide?
All Eazyweb solutions are powered by an advanced Content Management System called eazyCMS. This system allows our clients to update their own websites seamlessly from within their normal web
browser. The system comes with a lengthy list of professional features usually only found in high-end systems costing many thousands of pounds. It is a full multi-user system with advanced workflow
management, audit trails and more.
The element that I am most excited about at the moment - and really it's the Holy Grail of dynamic web development - is the ability for a client to create their own site online, with no input from us the developer. With the latest version of our eazySiteBuilder.com service, we have all but achieved that objective. Its very exciting to consider that the system is able to offer literally millions of different website combinations of images, colours, layouts & fonts, to produce a unique customised website.
Eazyweb are most proud of the colourisation
element of eazySiteBuilder.com - as it is now able to accept any custom colour and then dynamically create a website that matches any given corporate
colour. The commercialisation of this technology is very intriguing, as it is unique. As far as we know, there is no other system on the market worldwide that can colourise on-the-fly to the extent that
eazySiteBuilder can - there are plenty of systems that give you limited, pre-determined list of colour schemes with pre-made graphics, but with real dynamic colourisation, off-the-shelf websites in any colour
are now a reality.
This is of course absolutely ideal for companies that already have a logo developed and a colour scheme that they need to match.
What's been the key to your success?
Small is beautiful! Working for the larger corporates has made us fully conversant with the needs of larger organisations - brand awareness and adherance to corporate guidelines, etc. We have fully
taken on-board the 'big company' attitude. However, at the same time, we have been careful to not grow too big too quickly as a company. Thats great, because it backs up our entire philospohy....
"big enough to cope, small enough to care!"
Its something that underpins everything from the way that we deal with customers to the products that we have developed. Take eazyCMS for example: here is a product that compares at least as well as products costing tens of thousands of pounds out there in the market place! We took the eazyCMS product to Internet World a couple of years ago, and we heard the same thing over and again... "Wow! This is amazing. How come you guys aren't charging X thousand pounds for this!?" But that's it in a nutshell - the success has come from developing a solution that has been traditionally the preserve of big business, and making it available to the little guy.
What one piece of outside technology has benefited your company most?
I would have to say the emergence of PHP as the pre-eminent scripting language in the late nineties was a major turning point for us. It suddenly made everything possible: the shackles of static HTML
development were removed, and everything became achievable. Its a great community of developers out there, and the ability to learn from hundreds of thousands of other like-minded programmers in
the Open-Source community provided the platform for our programmers to create super-efficient, reliable and effective online tools for our clients.
If I could choose a second piece of outside technology, it would have to be Skype. Since setting up the Sydney, Australia office, our use of Skype has SKYrocketed! Connecting the offices to provide a constant platform for whiteboarding, brainstorming, and even just in supplying the digital 'watercooler' effect, helping to provide the all-important team unity, it really is hard to beat.
What one piece of advice would you give to start-up companies in your field?
THINK BIG, act small. Think big ideas about solving customers' problems, making better software, improving usability, extending featuresets, and adding bigger and better value. Yet, at the same time
dont stop acting like a start-up. Stay humble, courteous to customers, and always go the extra mile. The customer is king, and in the end they will reward you with repeat custom.
Where do you see your company going in the future?
Onwards and upwards! Bigger and better software solutions, delivered further afield, and always with the trademark Eazyweb customer service.
Find out more about Eazyweb at www.eazyweb.net.