Here at Thunderbolt Digital, we like to demonstrate why we’re one of the fastest-growing web design agencies in Surrey. So when we recently became the preferred web design agency for the Surrey County Council, we asked Louise Halloway from the Web Operations Team to explain why they chose Thunderbolt Digital and what qualities we’ve brought to the design and development process of their websites, including the new Health and Wellbeing Surrey site.
The Problem
We have approximately 70 different partnership and microsites across the council in addition to our main County Council website. We can’t design and develop all of these sites within the Digital Delivery Team; it just wouldn’t be sustainable.
Many of these sites are held with external design companies and the standard really varies. We wanted to give people a reason to approach our team and register their URLs with us. We needed to find a digital agency to work with.
Many of the existing websites had been designed by companies who understood print design but nothing about web design, so they are nice to look at but not that user-friendly. We needed to find a company we could work well with and who could help us check that the usability was there – and offer design and development. Finding an agency was also about finding people with whom we could build a reliable working relationship and who could help us deal with the volume of work.
People were sourcing work from multiple suppliers and getting really different levels of quality. We wanted to find one, reliable supplier. If you work with multiple suppliers you end up spending most of your time training and standardising. Having some consistency with content management systems and usability standards was important to us.”
The Solution
I googled for web design agency in Surrey because I thought it would be a good idea for us to use a local company and promote Surrey business. It ended up working particularly well because we’ve been able to do a lot of face-to-face work which we wouldn’t have been able to do with an agency that was geographically too distant.
When we first met Saybhan, the Managing Director at Thunderbolt Digital, his dynamic character won us over and once we started working with him and his team, it was clear we had found a company to whom we could easily explain where we wanted to get to but also take advantage of their design input as well. The Thunderbolt Digital team is friendly, approachable and great to work with. There is a good synergy between our in-house developers and Thunderbolt.
Saybhan and his team really added value to our projects. There are several more websites we need to work on and Thunderbolt Digital is now our preferred web design agency. We’ve found Thunderbolt to be really flexible and able to turn work around very quickly. They’ve been really open to the way we work and able to adapt quickly. We appreciate that working with us must be quite different to how many other clients work, but Thunderbolt has always been able to apply the relevant resources and deal with whatever the situation has been. We enjoy seeing them and feel we’ve been able to develop a good working relationship. The personalities involved with the company have made a big difference.
I would recommend Thunderbolt Digital web design agency to anyone. We have confidence in Thunderbolt Digital and in the way they respond to our requests. The personality and flexibility are just right. Finally, the diversity of Thunderbolt’s portfolio – public, private, large, small – and the consistent quality they have delivered has really given us confidence that we can get what we need out of this. Thunderbolt Digital has developed three microsites for us so far and we look forward to working with them on future projects.
Louise Halloway, Surrey County Council
Download a full version of this case study here.
If you are looking for web design agency or help with your online marketing, give us a call on 01252 413757 or email us on howdy@wearethunderbolt.com – we are a full-service digital agency in Surrey, based in Farnham and love to help local businesses thrive.