Our Services

HotHouse’s expertise in the digital space has been built up over 15 years of working with some of Australia’s leading brands and companies. We offer insightful and creative thinking, deep technical expertise and we’re always bottom line focused. After all, you’re not in this for the fun of it. You want to see measurable business success. You want to see ROI.

So show us your business plan and we’ll show you how to translate it online. Our strategic services include:

Market research

At HotHouse, our strategic thinking is guided by customer understanding, analytics and our unparalleled expertise across the digital landscape. Through user research we learn what customers want from your site, how they behave, where they hang out and where they go for their trusted information. From there we identify suitable opportunities, recommend the right tools to provide an enhanced user experience at each stage of the customer lifecycle, establish SEO requirements, and place relevant calls to action to engage your audience.

Business analysis

Business analysis is all about understanding the underlying framework of your business. As a critical part of the strategic process HotHouse holds stakeholder workshops to understand business goals, performs stakeholder analysis to ensure your strategy is aligned to your business goals and undertakes KPI development to determine the key success factors which can be used to measure and refine your site’s performance. We also help you identify whether there are any gaps that need to be filled in your market and opportunities that are there for the taking.

Technology innovation

At all times we’re technology agnostic, because it's the end solution that counts, not the tools you use to build it. With more than 15 years' experience, HotHouse’s team of developers has designed enough high volume, transactional, content management and e-commerce systems to know what works.

HotHouse boasts an industry-leading multi-skilled team that delivers best practice end-to-end application development. We produce pragmatic and effective solutions, driven by strong application design and code re-use strategies that are cost-effective and quick-to-market.

With such mobile device fragmentation, a mobile marketing strategy that focusses on device - or operating system-specific applications will severely limit the usefulness and accessibility of those applications. In short, it will limit the success and your ROI.

Think about it. If your mobile marketing strategy is aimed at a wide audience, device-specific apps restrict the utility of your tool to users of one type of phone. Following a device specific development strategy means you’ll need to double, triple, quadruple and more the cost of your development if you want your site and applications to be more widely available.

That just doesn’t make commercial sense. And in Australia, there are more than 1200 types of devices that access mobile websites. In the US, this figure is more than 2200. Are you really going to reach your target audience with a device-specific approach?

To succeed in the mobile landscape you need to deliver a consistent, highly tuned mobile experience - whatever the device, whatever the platform.

That’s why at HotHouse – we make it all about the experience and not the platform. We abide by a write once, run everywhere principle.

Of course many different factors drive the need to make your business successful online. To stay ahead you need to innovate on the run - quickly, cost-effectively and with instant feedback. Take a look at what your customers are doing on the web, and then look carefully at your digital strategy and communications. Chances are you'll find a sizable disconnect.

HotHouse's digital creative and web design services include:

Ideas and concepts

Ideas can transform the delivery of dry information into a fun and engaging experience. They can showcase a different viewpoint on a product, create desire for a product, or even reinvigorate public perception of brands and services. And ideas are memorable. Where straight product information may be forgotten, that same information wrapped in an idea may be remembered long after the brand communication has ended.

Information architecture

Not finding what they want is the number one reason why customers abandon shopping carts and leave your website. Enhancing the presentation of content on your website through effective organisation means the difference between people finding what they want or clicking away from your site. HotHouse has more than 15 years' experience developing clear and scalable information architecture for well known brands and companies.

Successful web development is so much more than how a website looks. It's a blending of intuitive navigation with rich, useful and usable content as well as striking visual design. Together these elements deliver engaging user experiences.

User interface design

HotHouse's user interface design team helps build better experiences by first understanding what your customers need to do and how they do it. We design the interface for usability, functionality and elegance.

Content development

As you start to make the shift to creating engaging content, you need to understand your customers' information needs. Content development is so much more than copywriting - it's about message development, engagement and delivery.

HotHouse has deep experience streamlining the content development process for some of the biggest companies in Australia. We can help you leverage content to engage customers and grow your business.

Learn more about HotHouse's web design and digital creative services.

Our approach to web design and development is also test driven - we start simple, then review, test and improve. This creates an easy to manage cycle of continuous improvement, and reduces the need for a dramatic rebuild down the track.

Having said that, a "big bang" approach can work, and we will happily follow that approach if it will truly meet your business needs. In fact, your business needs form the basis of everything that we do.

Our core strength

Technology and web development is our core strength and passion. We do all sized projects from small online marketing applications, to complex integrations and big brand consumer sites. From a staff intranet, to a secure supplier extranet, we get it right.

We use the latest web development technologies and ensure they work well with any of your existing technologies. That means we will always work in a way that works for you.

HotHouse's web development services include:

Web Technology Expertise

Web technology is continually advancing and providing more opportunities to create you a leading website. The HotHouse web development team is always up to date, and will use the web technology that best suits your project to give you the best solution every time.

Content Management Systems

A good CMS will put you firmly in control of all aspects of your content. We can help you choose and implement the one that will work for your business.

Ecommerce Platforms

To make ecommerce work, and work well, you need to integrate your platform with your business processes behind the scenes while providing a seamless experience to your customers up front. We have the background and experience to do it right.

Database Development

We can help you select and implement a scalable database that will match your requirements and grow with your business.

Systems Integration

We can get your systems to talk to each other, saving your staff a load of frustration, at the same time as providing a load of useful business information.

Contact Us to find out more about HotHouse's agile approach to website development.

Search marketing is all about ensuring your product, brand or service is there when your target audience is looking.

There are three essential elements to search engine marketing:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO may seem like magic, but it actually requires a strong grasp of both how search engines technically crawl and index pages and how searchers behave. HotHouse will help you set up and progressively improve your site’s structure, content and authority, so you maximise your ability to attract quality traffic from search engines organically (i.e. not from sponsored listings).

Paid Search (PPC)

Paid search is a highly tactical process for setting up and progressively improving paid search campaigns through channels like Google via sponsored listings. It’s about properly structuring and constantly improving campaign executions.

Internal search optimisation

Studies have shown that internal search on your site converts users at least three times better than users who don’t use search. That means it’s important that your site’s internal search functionality doesn’t let your customers down. Analysing your internal search data gives you an amazing insight into customer intent.

While distinct disciplines, the three elements of SEM all achieve the same three objectives:

1. Understanding what customers are looking for
2. Giving them the information they are looking for
3. Making your site an authority for that information

With 9 years experience HotHouse understands the keys to success in both SEO, Paid Search and Internal search optimisation. We can help you achieve the optimal balance between the three.

Learn more about HotHouse’s search engine marketing expertise.

HotHouse's social agency, House Party, provides expert services including:

Social media strategy

Most businesses, regardless of niche, can get value from engaging in the social web. But first you need to listen and then you need to join in the conversation.

But you don’t need something called a social media strategy. What you do need is considerable experience and know how to use social media tools to satisfy your business objectives. And that’s exactly how HotHouse can help you.

Social media services

House Party helps businesses achieve maximum impact in the social networking space. We can implement a wide range of tactics from blogging, using discussion boards, forums, social networks and Twitter, and we can monitor results and offer actionable advice.

Social media monitoring

An invaluable tool for listening to your target market as well as your competition - actively listening to the social web can help companies protect brand reputation, stay competitive and manage crises. House Party can help you identify, monitor and analyse online conversations in real-time, and help you leverage that intelligence to increase your ROI.

Social media blogging

Corporate blogs aren’t the answer for all companies, but they can often be a very effective tool for businesses to raise visibility and relevance. With their search engine optimisation advantage more blog entries mean more fresh content which provides more chances to show up on organic listings. House Party is skilled at using the blogging platform to create engaging conversations between businesses and consumers.

PR vs social media

As an evolving area of PR practice, it’s so much more than putting a PR pitch on Twitter or Facebook. It’s about using the platforms in ways that help connect businesses to their core audiences. House Party can work with your PR team to extend and complement your PR strategy into the social space.

Crisis management

The key to leveraging the social web in a time of crisis is to have the tools in place well before a crisis hits. Then when a crisis hits, it can be an effective and powerful tool providing a way for businesses to communicate with colleagues, customers and suppliers. House Party can help you develop a crisis management plan and put the listening platform in place to alert you about any potential crisis.

Learn more about how House Party can help you get the conversation started.

Websites are a fantastic source of business information. Everything you do online is trackable, and results of your campaigns and applications are truly tangible. You just need to implement the right plan.

Actionable insights

Data and web analytics provide the basis of this fantastic business information, but they are useless without insights. So our analytics team distils your data into something you can use. These actionable insights mean every improvement or change you make to your website or online activities can be based on facts.

Our analysis provides:

• a comparison of your website data with industry data
• a benchmark against which you can measure improvements

The web analytics we provide will enable you to make strategic improvements to your online activities to ensure they meet both your user needs and your marketing objectives.

A two phased approach to web analytics

Before the launch of any campaign, website or application, we work with you to customise a tracking plan that maps your business objectives, marketing objectives and KPIs. We then implement the plan.

After launch we gather information about user behaviour on your site then provide a dashboard of the results. The dashboard consolidates disparate information about your site and enables different people with in your organisation to drill down to the level of data that they need.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the main tracking tool we use. It provides monthly statistics, like the number of visits, the number of visitors and the number of people who "bounce away" to another site. It also provides a range of other useful data that we mine to create the insights and analysis.

Contact Us

If you want the facts about your online activities, talk to us about web analytics. We'll give you information that you can use.

The team provides a full range of web maintenance services to help you make the most out of your working site.

Because a website should never be launched and left. Customers tend to sense, and stay away from, a stale, neglected site and when that happens traffic will drop, and sales will probably follow.

The team’s services fall into two broad categories: website issues and website enhancements.

Issues management

Our issues management service starts with 24/7 direct telephone support. Should anything critical happen to your site at any time of day, immediate action will be taken to solve the problem.

Less critical issues are managed through the HotHouse Issues Management System. With managed services, you have a dedicated, personal point of contact to take ownership of your issues through to resolution.

Enhancements and business support

We offer the full range of business and website support in our managed services team: platform support, application support and marketing support.

• Platform support

  Your platform underpins everything your website does. It includes your operating system, programming languages and databases. We provide support for all these critical components.

  We also take care of your website hosting, ensuring that it lives in a secure and supervised environment with a powerful connection and a back up power supply.

• Application support

  Application support covers everything from your content management system to small components such any interactive tools, widgets and desktop devices. It spans administration of applications that HotHouse has created as well as maintenance of middleware applications.

  Application support provides you with incremental enhancements, minor changes and updates to all the applications that your website uses, ensuring that your website always works at its best.

• Marketing support

  We offer the full range of online marketing support: outbound CRM creation and management, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, online advertising, social media management and development, creative design and copywriting.

  We also provide tracking, reporting and analysis of user behaviour. For more information take a look at Analytics and Reporting.

The complete package

Our dedicated support team offers a range of expertise that cannot be matched by your internal resources, while the structure of our managed services enables you to tap into different elements of this expertise when you need it.

Our responsive yet formal process ensures you get quick and cost-efficient support with out reams of red tape. At the same time it ensures that you get complete transparency of everything we do.

Contact us

Our managed services team is dedicated to dealing with the specific needs of a live site. Talk to us. We can help you get maximum value from your website everyday.