Are you part of a group of partners or related organisations; maybe a business network, or a local community scheme?
Are you the person that manages and coordinates group membership? Or perhaps you manage the relationship between your organisation and the wider group?
Do many or all of your group have websites? If so, are their sites linked together properly? If a visitor finds one of your websites, is it easy for them to find the others?
Perhaps your sites are all separate, and it's hard for visitors to move between all of the sites in the group? If so, visitors aren't getting a sense of the community when they visit each individual organisation's website, are they? So you're not feeling the benefit of working together online.
If you're the central coordinator, how easy is adding new members to the group, or removing old ones? Do you find yourself emailing or phoning around all the other members of the community trying to get them to update their links pages? Or has everyone just left their pages to go out of date, and there are broken links everywhere?
Co-ordinating online groups can be a nightmare.
Gathering websites together into groups has always been challenging. Perhaps the biggest issue of managing a group of seperate websites is keeping them all up-to-date: when one member leaves or a new one is added to the group, everyone in the group has to change their links page separately.
Even in the most diligent group, co-ordinating all the members so that they don't get out of synch can be a challenge. And when members do get out of step, it looks unprofessional; visitors can get sent down blind alleys and be shown missing pages.
A mess like that doesn't just reflect badly upon individual members of the community... The whole group looks bad!
Manage your partner network quickly and easily.
But what if there were a quick and easy way to connect all of your group's websites together, and manage all those connections from one central location? What if visitors could:
- Search across all of the sites in the group in one go?
- Conduct this "cross community" search from within each of the community's individual sites?
- Focus the search upon each individual site?
- Have the best terms to search for suggested to them as they searched?
- Browse through a directory of partner members as well as search across them all?
What if, as the person who manages the group, you could maintain this group search and directory from one place, quickly and easily add new members, or remove old ones?
And how about the webmasters at the individual organisations: what if they could set up their links pages to update themselves every time the central links page was updated? And what if their site's search engine could find content from new members on its own, without them having to maintain it?
The Trovo Searchable Directory uses new technology.
Until recently, a system to connect a group of separate websites together and manage those connections would have been very complicated and expensive to set up. But over the last few years, two things have changed:
- New web technologies have been invented that make sharing data and information much easier.
- Google have release their Custom Search Engine.
Trovo has used these technologies to create our Trovo Searchable Directory. This provides you with the tools you need to manage searching and browsing across your partner community or business network, quickly and easily, from one central location.
Powered by Google's Custom Search Engine and Microsoft Office Live, and based upon modern web technologies such as XML and RSS, our community search allows you to:
- Put a search box on every page of every site in your community.
- Manage who is included in the search from one place via a web application you can access from a browser.
- Quickly and simply add and remove members.
- Publish a detailed directory of the sites in the group.
- Syndicate the directory to each partner organisation, so they can display it within their websites; but they don't have to worry about keeping it up to date.
The search engine itself:
- Is powered by Google; so it is quick, returns relevant results and is familiar to site visitors.
- Is easy to add to partner websites.
- Can be sub-divided, allowing visitors to search across all sites or focus on one specific site, or categorise results by themes.
...while at the same time the directory can be:
- Managed quickly and easily via a web browser using Microsoft Office Live.
- Published to a web page for the general public to browse.
- Syndicated to each partner organisation so their links page will always be up to date when changes are made.
We can even add a form to the directory to allow potential new partners to introduce themselves.
Lose the hassle of managing your web community.
The Trovo Searchable Directory takes away a lot of the work of managing links between organisations on the web, and we could set one up for you for as little as £500.
If you would like to know more about the
Trovo Searchable Directory, why not give us a call on
0116 232 5147? Or
fill in our contact form and let us know a convenient time for us to call you?