Surrey Hub is an online resource for businesses that cater for the Surrey area. Many parts of the site are still under development with the aim of eventually being a focal point for business and visitor activities.

The Surrey Hub site was Susumu’s first experience in using Drupal 7 to build an interactive website. Until now, our Drupal 7 portfolio was made up of brochure sites including Temple Property Services and Hotcakes Bakery. Surrey Hub allows for multiple user profile types with varying permissions and charges.

Users of the site are able to post events, use a forum and submit blog posts which are then approved by the administrators of the site. An accommodation section was added to the site to allow users to post rooms or houses available for rent for a small listing fee. Users are also able to post free ads indicating that they are looking for accommodation. The accommodation area of the site was built with the upcoming 2012 Olympics in mind. Many sites have already popped up catering for residents who wish to rent out their homes for the Olympic visitors.

As this was a fairly new site, Surrey Hub is relying on Social Media over SEO to promote the site. Our digital marketing expert Teenum devised a strategy making use of Twitter, Facebook and Pintrest. Google Adwords was also employed to purchase Surrey specific traffic.

We are using the popular feedback tool Get Satisfaction which installs a feedback widget as a tab on the site. Visitors and members on the site can use it to quickly flag up errors with the site, suggest features they’d like to see added or even give praise!

The Surrey Hub site is also trialling a relatively new engagement tool called Punch Tab. It, like Get Satisfaction, provides a tab on the side of the site which allows you to create rewards for when visitors perform certain actions, such as visiting the page, liking the Facebook page or following on twitter. You can also set up rewards for more specific actions such as posting a comment. You have control over what rewards you provide so it can allow you to be creative with your ideas. You set the number of points which must be achieved to access the rewards. Each activity rewards the user with a number of points. One cool feature is that you can view a leaderboard of points to see who is in competition for the rewards.

As phase 1 of the Surrey Hub site has been completed and local Surrey businesses are joining, there is still a lot going on behind the scenes. A market place is also being developed to allow businesses to have full control over their promotions and offers.

One of the main hurdles that we have faced with the next phase of development is that market place development is not ready for Drupal 7. This means we are having to build it using Drupal 6 and from this integrate the two versions of Drupal. Sounds like a lot of work, but actually we have found our knight in Drupal armour – aka the Bakery Module.

The Bakery module is a single sign on system for Drupal sites. The Bakery module together with some database connectivity will result in two websites seamlessly appearing as a single website to visitors and users.

You can visit the Surrey Hub website and leave your thoughts and feedback.

If you require a Drupal website, please do not hesitate to contact us today.