Media: CW Case Study on Easyjet's Website Development

EasyJet's website has grown in five years to a point where it deals with 11 million passengers a year. Simon Pritchard, EasyJet's web manager talks through the strategies that have enabled new developments on the Computer Weekly site.

'The second overhaul, in July this year, involved a website upgrade to provide customer registration facilities allowing the public to check bookings. The main headache here was to make the site straightforward and simple for customers and to keep the technology as invisible as possible, says Pritchard. That meant not just overcoming some major technical problems, it also tested his management skills to the full, he says.

"When you are grappling with a new technology, it is usually far from invisible in the first prototype," he says. "The developers have often worked very hard and are extremely proud of what they have come up with on that first prototype - but when someone new looks at it, they are horrified. The coders can be crestfallen and a lot of diplomacy is needed to manage that, but you still need to be quite ruthless to achieve your end result."'

Associated Link: CW: Blazing the Easyjet trail

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