Launched in November 2004, Healthy Food Guide has established itself as one of the hottest reads in its category, by applying the winning formula of bringing sense and balance to the highly emotive category of food.

Startup publisher Healthy Food Media Limited wanted from the outset a content-rich website to support its flagship publication. But just because you’re a startup business doesn’t mean that you have to settle for smalltime technology. In fact, the last thing a fledgling brand needs is to entertain the risk of being tainted by an amateur web presence.

Partnering with New Zealand IT and consulting company Fujitsu, www.healthyfood.co.nz is scaling up a dynamic web presence on the back of big thinking technology priced for New Zealand SMEs.

Mitigating the risks
The importance to Healthy Food Media of a superlative web presence is evident in its view of publishing and the importance of connecting with a community.

Healthy Food Media managing director Kim Mundell says publishing is very fast moving and a website offers a dynamic environment to support a passive medium, such as a magazine. Depth was another key ingredient.

“Magazines are good at breadth, but not depth. So if you want to put more depth into your stories it is good to have a website to complement the magazine. You end up building a community around your brand a lot better.”

With this in mind Mundell was very clear about what she wanted in a technology partner. A key requirement was speed. The entire project, from concept to go live, had to be completed within six weeks. The technology platform was also critical – the last thing any business can afford is to be stuck with marginalised technology. “One of my main fears was getting stuck with a proprietary system, written by some person in their backroom, which is typical of this space,” says Mundell.

“We wanted to know that there were multiple users on the platform and that it had been well tested; and that the tech support was there if it was needed.”

But more than just the technology platform was a desire to engage a technology service partner who placed as much emphasis on project management as the chosen technology. With an extensive background in corporate IT, Mundell was wary of the pitfalls that so often befall IT projects, and harboured a deep suspicion of suppliers who did not offer clearly defined sales, implementation and project management functions.

“Over the years I have seen just about every IT project go three times over budget, scope and time. Project management is potentially difficult. I knew I didn’t want a creative shop that was full of great ideas but unable to implement them, so a robust approach to project management was key.”

Requirements for scalability and price accessibility go without saying for a startup business. But unlike some small businesses, Healthy Food Media had the foresight to consider how its choice of supplier might impact the inherent value of its brand. “I wanted something that would be live on day one and something that I was happy putting our brand on.”

Smartening up content management
By selecting Fujitsu and its modular website technology Smart Content Manager, Healthy Food Media has taken web development and content management out of its black box and put itself in the driver’s seat.

The secret has been in the open source development platform used by Smart Content Manager, which is one of the world's fastest growing open-source platforms with a rich and active user community exceeding 33,000 registered developers.

Smart Content Manager takes the raw developments of this community and pre-configures modules for easy selection and implementation. The upshot is that end users can very quickly and affordably deploy and self-manage a scalable website. But more than that, the size of the development community means mandatory but non-value elements, such as ongoing development and testing, version control, patches and security, are all taken care of.

So, Smart Content Manager users get the best of both worlds – customisable website architecture without the requirement for any donkeywork. Control is another benefit. Smart Content Manager empowers non technical users to take care of the things that count the most – what’s presented to website visitors – because the development community has taken care of the programming. No wheels need reinventing and a functioning website can be up and running in a very short timeframe.

In the driver’s seat
Still in the formative stages of its growth, Healthy Food Guide has been an unprecedented success, reaching its 12 month subscription target in five months. The uptake is reflected in website activity, which regularly exceeds 3,000 visitors and 24,000 page views each month. And, at the request of Progressive Enterprises (owner of Foodtown and Woolworths supermarkets), Healthy Food Guide is now stocked in the sacred territory of their supermarket checkouts.

Close to two in five (40%) magazine subscriptions are sold via the website. “One of the most important functions of a website is to make money,” says Mundell. “So purchasing functions must be as easy to use as possible.”

Getting a website to do exactly what you want it to, without hours of expensive development and testing, is a breakthrough. And this, in a nutshell, is what Healthy Food Media achieved in a matter of days. In fact, the first prototype was up and running within just hours.

As the business grows, new functions are quickly and painlessly added, often without technical support. A recent example was the addition of survey functionality. “We simply plugged it in and turned it on, which was sensational. I felt like I had control – I had my hands on it, with no html programming experience,” says Mundell. “The fact that you were able to choose a template and customise it, rather than build it from scratch, gave me a lot of comfort.”

The big lesson for Mundell was not settling for a small business solution, which she says was the key to mitigating risk. “Don’t assume that just because you are a small business means that you have to work with a small business. Coming from a corporate background you bring expectations that your account is going to be managed professionally. I wasn’t going to put up with poor project management. We could have paid a few thousand less for another supplier, but for what we were getting and the risk mitigation it wasn’t worth it. As a small business you carry enough risk – so don’t expose yourself to more risk by choosing a shoddy supplier. The whole project went like a dream.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

FUJITSU NEW ZEALAND
+64 9 921 8093
www.fujitsu.co.nz