find4me

Melbourne based Escape Today wanted to build a new web portal to sell last minute professional appointments. They came to us with a business model based on proven examples like wotif.com and lastminute.com.au. This new web portal, to be named find4me, had to address the needs of 2 key user groups. The businesses that would be selling appointments and the users who would be buying them.

Our first task was to help Escape Today to strategise the building of a user base and the development process of this significant undertaking. In order to start  building Search Engine ranking from the earliest possible opportunity we quickly implemented a WordPress blog using a low cost, fast turn around web site design solution. This allowed us to plan the real web site development which was split into two additional phases while the web site was already building traffic.

The main web site would require membership with role based permissions to allow business owners to add their own business profiles and advertise their  available appointments. To avoid abuse of the open membership registration and ensure quality of content a workflow approval publication process would also be needed.

To minimise costs and time to market PMIC proposed using a third party, off-the-shelf web application framework to provide standard functionality and a solid foundation for the .Net web development of custom business requirements. For this site we used the Kentico CMS built on ASP.net.

A usable and valuable user experience would be pivotal in building a user base that would make the web site attractive to business owners. We advised adding a postcode based search to the category based search included in the initial draft of the web site requirements.

The functionality for businesses to add appointments and for users to find and book those appointments by paying a booking fee is what makes find4me standout from other professional services web site portals.

This web site is currently hosted by PMIC on a Windows server