Abacus has worked with Centaur since 1996, developing the very successful Lawtel service, followed by the first web site for The Lawyer. In 2007, Abacus won the contract to redevelop the Apply Now site, through which readers register and renew registrations for all the Centaur controlled circulation magazines. The previous site struggled to cope with the volume of complex form filling, and Abacus developed the new site to provide a high performance and stable environment built on our online form generation software, Inform.
This was awarded to Abacus in 2008 for the redesign and redevelopment of nineteen of the company’s magazine titles, including The Lawyer, The Engineer, Marketing Week, Design Week and New Media Age.
The new sites, due to go live in the autumn of 2009, will be based on Abacus’ Webvision content management and community software platform, providing a standard approach to editorial, directory and some community activities. A number of Abacus’ other products, including those for directory publishing, newsletter and image processing, will be incorporated into the overall solution, together with components from other specialists, such as Madgex (for recruitment) and Celerity (for registration and CRM).
Galya Holden, Web Services Director at Centaur Media, said:
“We selected Abacus for this important contract for a number of reasons. Abacus has a proven successful track record in working with other large B2B publishers, and their Webvision product can be integrated with other specialist software products to provide a cohesive solution. They offered a flexible and collaborative approach, demonstrating a keen understanding that a one-style-fits-all strategy would not work for Centaur Media, where each title is encouraged to find the best fit for its specific market.”
