Marathon Website Project

We’re nearing the finish line on a marathon website project. I checked the blog archive, and the first time I mentioned this client was back in March when I wrote about coming Full Circle since my first “real” job after college. The Construction Estimating Institute, referred to as CEI since we redesigned their logo, began a massive website consolidation project over the summer. And it’s almost ready to go live.

What led to CEI’s need to consolidate multiple websites into one web presence? Diversification. Over many years CEI was forced to adjust its sales strategy because of external changes in the market. Both economic and competitive, these external influences spurned new product development and the need to find new customers.

In a nutshell, CEI trains contractors. But the construction industry is broad and deep with many different market segments. And companies that deliver educational products and services, like most businesses on the planet, have been going through transformational changes since the mid 1990’s when the Internet came into play.

CEI still produces instructor-led, classroom-format courses – as they have since they started in the early 1980’s. However, that business is susceptible to the boom and bust cycles that affect the construction industry. And these traditional courses are geared towards existing businesses, primarily for their estimators and project managers.

CEI also provides a fair amount of contractor’s license exam prep and continuing education classes in the Florida market. The former being a significant investment for entrepreneurs with a strong appetite for risk, and the latter viewed as a necessary evil mandated by the state on a two-year cycle. This part of their business is much more competitive, the customers are price-sensitive, and the format is, more-and-more, moving to online delivery.

And finally CEI creates custom, private, onsite training programs for both corporate and government clients. In fact they’ve been working with corporate clients for years, but recent government contracts with the Florida Department of Transportation have accelerated growth and have the potential to transform the business yet again.

Considering the fact CEI has several existing websites, each designed to support specific segments of their business, consolidating them all into on unified web presence has been no small order.

We spent several months in the panning stages. There were multiple rounds of wire frame revisions, and we went through several design iterations before writing a single line of code. And since we started building their new website, there have been subsequent changes to both their pricing strategy for a key product line, and several tweaks to the online shopping experience.

At this point the website is built, nearly all of their content is has been uploaded, and this week we’re focused on testing the environment to make sure everything is working as expected. With any luck, all will go well and we’ll pull the trigger on Friday. Exciting times at CEI…

Until next week,

Matthew Anderson, President
Milestone Marketing Associates, Inc.