Advantage West Midlands website revamped and ready for business

Regional development agency Advantage West Midlands has revamped its website to significantly improve the service offered to businesses, partners and potential investors in the West Midlands.
Following six months of work, the site has been relaunched to make it more user-friendly for the million visitors a year who are looking for information about business support, projects, documents, property, case studies and facts about the region. Advantage West Midlands has worked with Warwickshire-based digital agency Freestyle New Media and web technology solutions company Amaze on the revamp

and has consulted with journalists, businesses and partners to find the most accessible means of tapping into the information. Among the special features on the site are an interactive map which showcases Advantage West Midlands’ projects across the region, improved access to Agency staff contact details and subscription to a news feed and e-newsletter. In addition to strategies and documents, the website will contains hundreds of pages of news stories and case studies of dozens of Advantage West Midlands projects – ranging from the Fort Dunlop redevelopment to the £7.5 million regeneration project in Craven Arms to the £70 million Premier Automotive Research and Development programme at Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Sian Jamieson, Advantage West Midlands e-Communications Team Leader, said: “The Agency invests more than £300 million each year, is working to improve the lives of more than five million people in our region and is the voice for the West Midlands internationally so it is absolutely vital our website is of the highest standard. “It is important our partners, businesses and the public can find what they are looking for easily, whether it is information about applying for funding, stats about the West Midlands or finding out about what we are doing in their area to improve lives. “A tremendous amount of effort has gone into making the website as accessible as possible and we are confident it will make a major contribution to our on-going efforts to communicate effectively with our customers and stakeholders.” Another of the innovative features of Advantage West Midlands’ new web platform is that it will give partner organisations access to a template-based website development package. Organisations and projects funded by Advantage West Midlands will be able to set up their own websites, enabling multiple authors from different organisations to update web pages while ensuring content is displayed in a consistent, user-friendly format.