A new website promoting Preston as a modern, creative, innovative European city has gone live.
www.prestonvision.co.uk features links with popular social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr, allowing Preston people to get involved in discussions about the planned transformation of their city over the next decade.
As well as expressing their views on current projects and initiatives featured on the site, the public can contribute videos and photographs which celebrate the area’s beauty, heritage and personality to help raise the city’s profile as part of the bid to attract investment.
The fresh, sleek, clean website was designed by Preston creative agency ID and commissioned by Preston Vision Ltd, the regeneration company which is driving forward proposals to transform the city.
Preston Vision’s head of marketing and communications Emma Blackman said: “The website is a key part of our strategy to market Preston in a comprehensive and far-reaching way, bringing together the city’s best attributes and proudly showing them off.
“Preston is a vibrant, compact city with fantastic transport links and a lot of personality, this website will give Preston a new platform to stand alongside it’s European counterparts, showcase development opportunities and highlight Preston’s strengths in sectors such as advanced manufacturing , knowledge and design.
“The website is fully integrated in terms of social media so that Preston people feel part of it and, most importantly, can contribute towards telling the world what a great place it is to live, work or visit - it’s a celebration of Preston. Feedback from local people about our proposals now and as the projects are rolled out is also crucial.
“These are potentially very exciting times for Preston and its people as the city positions itself as a 21st century centre of knowledge and innovation.
“We were delighted to find the creativity and technological expertise needed for our website right here in Preston with the ID creative agency.”
Strategic Account Director at ID Jonny Wilde said: “It’s been a privilege to work on such an important site for the City of Preston. The new brand was easy to work with, and the client was great!
“Integrating so much social media into the site means the community can contribute and that’s something we’re interested in observing, to see how the social media and website channels blend - it should be very interesting.
“We’re very pleased with the final product and have enjoyed the follow-on opportunities with Preston Vision such as exhibition systems and email marketing, it’s a great relationship, and one I’m confident will only grow over time as we work closely moving forward.”
The site was developed using ID’s content management system (CMS) with several enhancements such as:
- Social media integration, including Twitter (both account and search related feeds), Facebook, Flickr (particularly the header on the ‘Preston is Evolving’ page which is made up of images drawn from Preston photographers), YouTube, Delicious and LinkedIn
- Pages tailored in terms of colour and style according to the user journey
- RSS feeds from tourism and property sites are to be integrated making the site a hub of information for the whole of Preston
- Site map footer which acts as the breadcrumb trail highlighting where the user is on the site, and delivering great linking into the content of the site
- Newsletter subscription which feeds directly into the email marketing platform
The site is built with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind and features SEO tools in the CMS and rich keywords all over the site giving natural search success, especially relevant to the recently launched Google Instant.
You can visit the site on www.prestonvision.co.uk.
Its just a pity you can't access the web site using IE6!!!
ReplyDeleteThanks 'Anonymous' there are transparencies and other features we wanted to use on the site and as even Microsoft themselves have disowned that browser, last month it made up only 4.1% of the browsers out there!
ReplyDeleteNot insignificant - but is also on a downward trend at quite a pace. Within a few months it's likely to be below 3%.
We gave browser suggestions on the page you would have been presented and we would recommend you upgrade asap or ask your IT department to do it for you, you're probably missing out on quite a lot out there, the web will be a refreshing place once you get a browser upgrade :-)
Facebook stopped supporting IE6 back in August, not that that is the 'be all and end all', but it is a true indicator that it's time to move on, and we're just trying to help.