by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

When I started this company three years ago, my plan was to build a virtual business, with all our people working from different locations. Eventually, we got to a size where we needed to have a core team in-house, and now we have an office manager, two sales managers and a content manager working together. But most of our people are still scattered around the UK, and our technology supports our original intention – particularly our content-management system.

Every bit of technology we use is web-based, right down to our Sage accounting system – our management accountant is homebased and accesses it remotely. We have a small business server and network, but it doesn’t do a lot for us, it just runs the office. Our main site, www.privatehealth.co.uk, is a big website, with 6,000 pages and 330,000 visitors a month. People visit it when they’re looking for private healthcare suppliers, and we make our money from the suppliers through advertising. We developed it and update it using a content management system called EasySite from EIBS. It manages all the databases and governs how everything’s presented on the website. We’ve also used EasySite to develop other websites, including www.treatmentabroad.net, which, over 18 months, has become the leading destination for people looking for treatment overseas.

Before starting this company, I worked as a healthcare marketeer, and became interested in the internet in the nineties. I was running a company developing websites for healthcare clients that got taken over, and I saw an opportunity to develop my own websites. I knew of EasySite because I’d sold it to two or three clients who were looking for a content-management system that staff could update themselves, even if they weren’t IT-literate. We’ve never paid for or invested in training, although EIBS does provide it.

EasySite has allowed us to expand our web publishing activities phenomenally without a significant cost increase. Once you’ve paid the licence fee upfront, you can build other connected sites for free.

We’re building a site called Treatment in Hungary, which is reusing content from other sites and, in an hour, we’ve been able to put together a 60-page site. Obviously, if you want a different design you pay for it. We’ve spent a bit of money on enhancements. But unlike some content management systems, where you pay something upfront, then £10,000 a year for support, EasySite’s ongoing maintenance is just £600 a year.

Hosting does cost a bit – we anticipate spending £20,000 next year, but it is the core of our business. The beauty of this system is that, being web-based, it doesn’t matter where in the world our editorial staff, content managers and contributors are based. That’s allowed us to build our contributor base very quickly.

It’s also very easy to build searchable databases. We have 40 or 50 databases, and we’ve just added another for hearing-aid dispensers, which, ignoring the time it took to input data, we put live on the site in 20 minutes. EasySite also has good search-engine optimisation built in. If you type “medical tourism” into Google, we get the top four positions. We don’t pay for it, it’s all organic, natural positioning. We spend a lot of time and effort using our content to target around 2,000 search terms.

That’s why I would have concerns about switching to another supplier. If Google didn’t like the way the information was presented, for example, such a decision would kill our business overnight.

Tags: entrepreneurs, homeworking, easysite, sales, google, me and my back end, keith pollard, doing business overseas, starting a business, virtual business, technology in business, flexible working, database management,