After too many years of absence, the famous Solex brand comes back in the marketplace with a brand new design and powerful values: 'econological' and reliable e-bikes with a strong focus on aesthetics, freedom and mobility.

To help bringing up that new business challenge throughout Europe, K Company – together with McCann Lowe – was selected to analyze, design and implement the new Solex World European websites (www.solexworld.com). Umbraco was chosen as the global CMS platform. In 2011, up to 10 countries will be involved in the roll-out plan (BeNeLux, France, Spain, Italy...). Expectations go even beyond that in 2012. Another fruitful long-term client relationship has just started for K Company!

Challenges

With this new project, K Company further develops his experience with large implementation of Content Management Systems supporting critical business & marketing issues.  Numerous challenges were indeed to be overcome that are quite specific to this particular project :

• The urgency of the delivery. In about 2,5 months, we had to analyze, implement and deploy (“from scratch”) the core European platform; the first country websites (.be, .fr...) were deployed about 3 months after the project kick-off
• The business development challenge. Since it is about relaunching the Solex brand all over Europe, a strong collaboration was needed with both our client (D’Ieteren Sports / Power To Wheels) and our partner for design & communication work (McCann Lowe). K Company took the lead of the overall project management
• The good balance to be found between User Experience (UX) and Search Engine Friendliness (SEF) requirements. A challenge in particular was to propose a kind of “one page website” (with quick and direct access to the basic information) that would be “search engine friendly” despite the use of Javascript and other HTML5 techniques
• The compliance with any type of (recent) device/OS/browser, like PC’s, smartphones or tablets. Therefore we focused much of our energy in the definition of the user interface concept and of the technical requirements (deep use of HTML5 techniques was one of them)
• The user acceptance and the overall change management approach. This was – and is still – done through extensive long-distance training as well as ongoing support to all Solex content managers

Want to know more and to discover the new World of Solex? Just go to www.solexworld.com.