It’s two and a half years to this day that Chris Anderson, the famous editor in chief of Wired has published his provocative piece entitled “the web is dead” in which he describes a new world in which information is consumed through mobile applications and no longer the browser on a desktop – or laptop – PC. Two years later, it hasn’t quite happened that way. It’s true that a lot of tablets were and are still sold but the Web hasn’t quite disappeared and as I am just coming from from the Mobile World Congress which took place in Barcelona at the end of February, it’s probably even less true, once I’ve just gone through the announcements of new mobile Operating Systems (Sailfish, Ubuntu and Firefox) which rely heavily on HTML5 even to build and share apps. In fact, it may even be the other way round one day, with apps being replaced with online webapps. Time will tell …
At the moment, as I look back on more than two years spent on the improvement of our Corporate website – of which we can see the splash screen above, we haven’t quite seen the end of the old website … even tthough we say that things are evolving quite a lot, even though not so rapidly as we would have expected.
It’s true that the world has changed though; and the Web has become more and more interactive. I have been personally involved in promoting, using and developing and even structuring our social media activities for 5 ½ years – first for Orange Business Services, second for the Orange group. Interactive, sharable content and social media has become key to our activity at all times and in all parts of the company. We have more than 6 million facebook fans and above 600,000 followers on Twitter across 80 accounts. Orange Group itself now has gather a significant number of individuals who want to interact with us on social media. So as social media becomes more and more integrated and mature (LinkedIn is 10 years old and Facebook is 9 years old in 2013), we can no longer look at social media as “something we need to think about in the future”, it is here to stay for us to share and enhance our discussions, and interact with the content we produce at the centre. The website is no exception, it needs to take this into account and this is what we started to think about in early 2011, hence our digital strategy which we’ll describe in the following pages…
Our main challenges as the Group Internet dept is not just to look after ourselves but to provide guidance, support and tools to all other entities within the Group, in France and abroad. This is what we have done throughout the years and it has materialised through a number of tools and hubs which we have installed in Facebook, slideshare, LinkedIn, Dailymotion, Twitter etc.
The true challenge for a group like usisalso a matter of innovation and it’s one which has taken us beyond the meredevelopment of social media communities. We have indeedhadthis vision thatwehad to take social media beyondthat stage in order to integrate all those social platformsintoour main Web Estate. The ideawas to have a platform, a socially-enabledplatform and webuilt on thisdiagram in order to create the Orange websitegenerator.
We have even endeavoured to use this metaphor of a service offering to the full by creating two electronic booklets, one of which is the basis for this presentation: one of our offer is devoted to social media;one is devoted to website creation. The one I am going to use in this presentation is the website generator offer and I will describe how it works, what it used for and why we designed it.
this is the initial plan for the Orange website generator, a vision of a factory-like concept which could be of use to all our entities, which would be simple and straightforward and would lead to better results and increased benefits for all.
Before we delve into the features, I’d like to dwell on the kind of problem we were trying to solve and some of the guiding principles behind it.
Our website generator is aimed at solving that particular issue. It is directed at all our business units which want to develop their online presence,
the scope of the website generator is communications only and the standard offers covers some of the most common areas such as hosting and standard navigation and look and feel. Data entry may even be added in certain cases and e-marketing.
what is will cost our internal clients depends on whether they decide to go for the standard offer or if they wish to add specific bespoke features
benefits are numerous, starting with the amazing page ranking derived from the orange.com domain name (which was created in the early 1990s and is above 6). This ensures that the content of the newly created website will be easily found and that means more savings by way of SEM. It also ensures usability and consistency – a benefit for all users – and the security and stability of an Orange own hosting (delivered by Orange Business Services.other features include “readspeaker” for the visually impaired and the extranet capability. In essence, everything which has been designed for one particular set of users will be usable by all others without having to do anything. This is the benefit of mutualisation.
Yet, our offering wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t offer the ability for users to specify their own requirements. Depending on how useful the features required by users are, we might cover the costs centrally or decide to share them with our users.
One of the major benefits is of course decentralised admin which is coupled with central support and training. This ensures that our users can keep a hand on their websites but aren’t left to themselves and receive support and guidance from us.
We decided to improve our website generator and a new version will be made available very shortly. It will ensure that standard website creation is made possible at the push of a button…
we have noticed that our first version of the Orange website generator wasn’t standard enough and that it was causing a number of issues which we decided to solve through its version 2
The process is fourfold and automated. An instance of the website is generated on the main hosting platform and admins are granted access so that they can populate the site with content. This is obviously the right process for a standard Website
our webiste generator can typically cover these content types. folders are any combinations of the other content types in order to produce a fully-fledged section on a particular subject. Please note the integration of the dailymotion platform (of which Orange has now taken control of and is our preferred way of delivering video content).
news feeds can be manifold, from standard press releases and content pages which can be reused from the main corporate website (available in several languages) to custom newsletters and even custom news pages built from alternative news feeds.
as explained earlier one of the features which is most dear to our hearts is the integration of social media within the platform. We didn’t do this with just the corporate website in mind; instead, we have wanted to integrate these features in order to make them available to all and especially websites for which it would be more relevant the orange.com site. There are several levels of socialisation of our website generator, and here there and in almost the right order:the social media hub is where users can access all social media platforms in order to be able to link to all the necessary social media platformsbadges are probably the most trivial item by way of socialisation, we have them installed on all pages and this is not the most sophisticated part of our workblogs are a must, and we have integrated our mutisitewordpress platform within our main offering. After much consideration, we have decided to keep this best of breed solution for blogs because we do a lot of guest-bogging and external bloggers are all asking for Wordpress to be used because this is the platform which they all use, barring a few exceptions
the fourth level of socialisation on the website generator is that of sharing buttons which can be activated or de-activated automatically on a given page depending on how relevant they are with regard to the content on the pagewidgets are number 5: we can inject feeds from social media platforms and accounts through these widgets and they can be activated within the website generator by other websites tooinside Orange is the last level of socialisaton, a fully-feldgedcuration platform and is probably our most sophisticated tool on the generator. It’s now our 3rd most viewed section on the main orange.com website.