Picture: Co-founder Xiong Zhou (standing) with his Forecepts team

September 2008: So you would like a 7-Day Korea New Adventure tour by CTC Holidays, leaving at the end of this month? However on the Web site, the e-mail button for you to click and make your booking has turned red, which means you shouldn’t bother because the tour is full.

Look for other tours instead where the e-mail button is either orange (seats are filling fast) or green (still available).

Such simple but effective design ideas are the hallmarks of Forest Concepts (Forecepts for short), a five-year-old Web design and development firm that started life as a two-man team from a home office.

“In the beginning, the going was tough,” says co-founder Xiong Zhou. “We have lots of rejections and lots of competition.” While his partner, Lee Peng, did the programming and backend work, Xiong Zhou did the marketing and sales. Their first major success came from CTC Holidays, a long-time tour operator in Singapore.

Today, at his compact office in a small office block in Kelantan Lane (a stone’s throw from Sungei Road thieves’ market), Xiong Zhou and his 14-men team are having their hands full, with more than 100 customers using their services. Besides corporate sites, Forecepts also handles micro-sites. These are usually small, separate sites that the customer requires for a specific promotional campaign or related event. The site is deleted once the event is over.

CTC Holidays’ site remains the showpiece of Forecepts’s success. “We build and manage the site for CTC, as well as their membership database,” says Xiong Zhou. “We are now adding more sophisticated functions such as the integration of instant hotel and flight booking confirmation systems with CTC’s partners.”

Other requirements from CTC Holidays include online marketing and search engine optimisation, tracking of users visiting the site, measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns, adding better security to the server, and creating a credit card payment gateway.

There’s also “re-skining” to be done every year, that is, changing the look-and-feel of the site, and always the challenge to make user navigation and transaction simpler, speedier and smoother.

At the back end, the customer’s employees should also find it easy to go into the site to make changes and update the content. Forecepts’s philosophy is to develop a content management system where little learning is required from the employees. “If the employees don’t find it comfortable to use, then they will not update regularly,” Xiong Zhou says.

The firm develops its own content management system that allows a seamless integration with the unique business requirements of different clients. While off-the-shelf solutions may put certain restrictions on the way the user can use it, Forecepts’s ability to custom build web-based applications removes this constraint and allows for a more integrated system that complements the work flow of the client’s business processes instead.

More on Forecepts

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