ESC Website Development

This requirement is for a website development project within the Children, Young People and Education Directorate. The Council is launching an Education Services Company ('ESC') in the spring of 2018. Nine services will transfer across to the new company including: Early Years and Childcare, Educational Psychology, Safeguarding, EduKent, Schools Financial Services, School Improvement, Governor Services, Skills and Employability and Outdoor Education. We are looking for a developer with a technical focus as a key requirement is to introduce e-commerce. This tender is aiming to replace the EduKent website (www.edukent.co.uk) with a new site which will promote all the services provided by the Council plus offering statutory and other commissioned services and relevant information with a launch date of Monday 12 March 2018. This means the site will promote non-ESC services which won't be delivered by the ESC (such as the Council's Schools Personnel Services and cleaning services etc and services from Gen2 (property related services) and Invicta Law (legal services)). ESC website objectives 1) The ESC website to act as the single front door for all education services delivered out of KCC. 2) To deliver maximum sustainable income for ESC: - by optimising cross/up-selling and bundling - by promoting related products/services. 3) To integrate online sales to the EduKent CRM to deliver data for marketing and on-site cross-selling 4) To provide excellent user experience - single sign-on, responsive design, easy search and navigation, a seamless transfer from the ESC to the e-Learning platform, etc. 5) To feature tailored/relevant, 'sticky' but concise content. 6) To launch the new ESC website on Monday 12 March 2018. Our ultimate goal is to simplify the landscape so that ESC customers only have to go to one central website for all their education services. Due to time and budget constraints it is anticipated that this will initially be achieved in two stages: Stage 1 - A central portal site built to replace - EduKent - www.Edukent.co.uk. As well as selling services, it will offer statutory services and feature bite-sized information. The site will feature libraries of products and information across all nine ESC services. We will also want to migrate the KCC safeguarding blog (https://kentesafety.wordpress.com/), building this into the new site. Stage 2 - Migration of the Schools Financial Services website http://edukentsfs.squarespace.com/ and Early Years and Childcare's www.threadsofsuccess.co.uk. If affordable we will also want to migrate Adventure Kent - http://www.adventurekent.org/. It is anticipated that any contract entered into will provide for flexibility in delivery and as a result reasonable additional services may be added to the contract to allow for continued effective delivery Tenders will be assessed using MEAT award criteria, which will be measured using a Price per Quality Point scoring method.

Additional information: All expressions of interest must be made at https://www.kentbusinessportal.org.uk/ Expressions of Interest cannot be accepted by any other method and any made by other methods may not be accepted.