Afren has grown at an impressive rate over the past five years since its formation in 2004.
The company has gone from a pure oil exploration company to a full oil producer in early 2008 and not surprisingly, this rapid growth has seen the need for the company to evolve their brand communications in-line with this.
From a content perspective, Afren's old website was not lacking much but the visual presentation of material and the user interface was not truly reflective of the brand, nor intuitive to use.
From a design and branding perspective we developed a fresher more contemporary feel for the site which aligned with the visual direction for the brand we introduced within the 2008 annual report.
Underlying the design of the site is an enterprise solution CMS allowing Afren to edit text in a simple WYSIWYG editor as well as the ability to add and remove sections of the site and their relevant lower level pages. Each page works much harder with the ability to provide related links sections and push information to the reader and provide easy navigation between pages on the site.
The CMS allows the author to keep previous page copies, allowing for ease of backtracking to a historic page version. Similarly, future content can be created, viewed off-line and left unpublished allowing for quick and simple publishing when ready.
We also take care of the hosting and back-up/recovery plan for the website.
Integrated into the CMS is an HTML publishing tool. Having designed a number of HTML templates, the CMS allows Afren to enter content into pre-defined fields for each email.
The database is also managed through the CMS. Recipients can be entered manually or are automatically put into one of three pre-determined mailing databases by selecting the relevant email alert within the 'Contact us' section of the website.