Name of your website?Gabriel & James Executive Search and Human Capital
Your name?
Vince Hamford
Your Location (city, etc)
London
Please give us a short summary of your website?
It its a corporate website for a boutique Executive Search and Human Capital consulting business with useful resources for candidates, clients and a large links and research section about to "go live".
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Quite simply we needed a global shop window with which to display our service offereings, but we decided at the beginning to offer more to our visitors than an online corporate brochure or list of jobs.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
My first ever site was launched in 1998 and was a basic 3 page website for a recruitment consultancy, my first credible site was launched in 2003, again another recruitment business.
Before an aquisition removed it from visability, this site was achieving over 50,000 hits a month from very careful and strategic SEO.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Based upon the company name and service offerings.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
Our USP is that the site was designed to go beyond being an online corporate brochure, its design includes a fairly comprehensive, yet simple to navigate, graphical lead reference site. The purpose is to ensure our visitors will come back to us when needing to source information either professionally or in their personal lives. This should ensure we are regularly in their minds from a brand awareness perspective.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Our ultimate goal is to be the executive recruitment site of choice and to add long term strategic and commercial value to the brand.
Our short term goal is to be multi-linguistic by the end of 2008.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Time will tell, but we believe you only get out what you put in!
A world class website is a living breathing thing that evolves and changes to meet the needs of its visitors. The more time we spend meeting these changing needs the more we will get out of it.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We built the site on a finite budget so have alot to achieve with limited resources. With an unlimited budget I would still keep the site visually simple but would throw much more into pay-per-click to boost rankings and hire a few more specialists!
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
The simple answer is that we will benchmark our success rate at the 6 month point. We will then revise our strategy to cope and add resources if necessary.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Its got harder and harder to get free search engine submission and the "sand boxing" is a headache due search engines fear of unethical and spam sites.
This has made it harder for us decent folk to get results as fast as we used to!
What has been your biggest challenge?
Cost effective and meaningful optimisation.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Ask me again in six months!
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Its harder than it used to achieve fast growth and volumes of traffic.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Its been live a few weeks and if we dont enjoy big gains we need to revise our strategy. We will keep it up permanantly.
Whats not on your site that you are planning to add?
We will be adding our own Blog in the very near future once the core of the site is complete, we aim to have Chinese, French, German, Spanish and French language sites by year end and will be evolving and developing whatever we feel adds value and creates an effective user experience for our target market.
What is your website address?
Gabriel & James Executive Search and Human Capital
