A new business relationship. New premises. And … a new website.
Building great websites is one of the many things we love doing – one of the latest being for a long-standing client, Barker Insurance.
Like Flow, Barkers (as it’s called by those in the know) is decidedly people focused and a family business since its establishment in 1973. You feel the deep staff bonds the moment you walk into its offices. The company also prides itself on strong relationships with its clients.
Big things have been afoot at Barkers in the past while, not least the company becoming an autonomous division of Hollard – whose insurance products it has been selling exclusively for more than three decades – about a year ago, for regulatory reasons.
Then Barkers moved into swish new premises in the brand-new Oxford & Glenhove office block in Rosebank, Johannesburg, just a stone’s throw from its old offices in Oxford Road.
What it really needed next was, of course, a revamped website. The old Barkers site, for example, was not mobile responsive and also required a visual refresh – plus Barkers wanted the new site to focus more on its people, who are at the centre of how it does business.
Flow project manager Gail Cameron, designer Clement Nkoko and web developer Klaus Alusa leapt into action, and a variety of design options were presented to the Barkers team.
Once a new design was finalised, the new website was programmed and the old site’s content migrated using a clever computer script written by Flow.
The result is a website that’s corporate and clean, but still reflects Barkers’ people-centred offering. We’ve also built it using the user-friendly Craft content management system, so that Barkers staff can upload and update content.
The site is also completely responsive, so that Barkers clients and other visitors to the site can access it easily from their smartphones.
Barkers personal insurance consultant Louise Forsyth, Flow’s point of contact for the website project, agrees.
“The new website has a fresh, fun and friendly feel to it, although still very professional,” she says.
“We’re a business that prides itself on offering personal service and that clients deal with real people, so it was very important to showcase our team, our story and philosophy, and to have that felt throughout the website. We’re really enjoying the new website and we hope our clients will, too.”