Get your company on the web

Case study: Making mortgages simpler on the web

Web sites are increasingly becoming a necessity for all businesses, large or small. As an SME, it allows you to have a shop window on the internet and also acts as a new channel to market.

However, the challenge is to develop an initial site that looks professional, gives you everything you need, but doesn’t cost the earth. That’s exactly the situation that Cheshire Mortgage Services found itself in.

Cheshire Mortgage Services is an independent mortgage advice company located in Altrincham, Cheshire. It has a nationwide client base and specialises in custom mortgage solutions for clients looking at standard purchases, remortgaging, additional borrowing and buy-to-let.

The company competes with traditional institutions, such as banks and building societies, by using state of the art mortgage search engines, which interrogate the whole market place to find the best product for each client.

Within months of setting up the company, the husband and wife team realised that a website was an essential part of the business – both to attract and contact new customers – and looked around at the available options. After careful consideration, it chose EasyWeb from BT, as it provided a simple-to-implement and high quality website at a reasonable cost.

“The internet is an ideal tool for allowing us to compete on equal terms with much larger players, but a web site has to look professional and do what it’s suppose to – give customers information about the company and services, and enable them to contact you,” explained Mike Parker at Cheshire Mortgage Services. “It also had to be cost effective, which is why we chose BT.”

EasyWeb web sites are based on a range of design templates and allow customers to rapidly deploy a professional site of between two and five pages. The customers choose from predefined front, product, service, contact and ‘about us’ pages, adding their own words and images. As a result, two pages can take just one week once BT’s designers receive the initial information.

“The process was so simple – we met with our BT account manager, wrote the content and then forwarded it to BT along with our chosen photography,” said Parker. “Then we worked with the team to make any final tweaks. It couldn’t have been easier. We also wanted to add a contact form so that new customers could enter details and make enquiries, which posed no problems at all.”

One of the other important considerations was the ability of the website to grow with the business. The initial site was three pages – a homepage, contact page and a partner page – but as the number of services Cheshire Mortgage Services offers increases, the amount of pages and information on the web site will also increase.

The web site has been so successful with new customers that Cheshire Mortgage Services is currently planning new features that will allow existing customers to check the status of their mortgage or application. This will enable them to access all the information they need, when they need it, and also reduce the number of telephone enquiries that the company receives.

“We knew that a professional web site would be an important part of our business, but we’ve been surprised by the impact it had in terms of attracting new customers. It is an essential part of our company’s

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