A Berkshire-based residential care home, The Coombe House, is promoting its caring atmosphere through its new ‘soft and gentle’ website.

Marian Windebank, one of the proprietors of The Coombe House, takes up the story: “Suzanne Major (The Coombe House’s other proprietor) and I started to think about having an internet presence some two years ago. As the majority of our new residents come to The Coombe House through recommendation, our objective was to provide an information resource rather than a marketing tool. Increasingly, prospective residents and their families were asking if The Coombe House had a website they could visit.”

Marian continues: “When I began to think about a website for The Coombe House, I contacted some local web developers to ask for quotes. The prices proved to be prohibitive so the website plans were shelved. However, early in 2008, Karen Chapple of IRUN Newbury was recommended to me by a friend. We asked Karen to provide a proposal and a quotation and the price given was within our budget, so IRUN Newbury was commissioned to develop The Coombe House website.”

Karen Chapple of IRUN Newbury comments: “Working with Marian and Suzanne, IRUN designed and built the website using IRUN’s WebBuildPRO package. We demonstrated the design options and advised on the look and feel of the website. It was a consultative process, with Marian and Suzanne making the final decisions. We also made recommendations about the relevant keywords which The Coombe House should include in their copy.”

The pictures on the site were taken by Marian and Suzanne: a challenge in the very poor weather conditions of 2008, but within a few weeks The Coombe House website went live. Visitors to the site have provided some positive feedback, saying the site is not too ‘busy’ and is factual; essential when providing an information resource. The Coombe House website has been indexed by Google, and further work on the optimisation will be carried out by Karen to ensure success on the search engine rankings. All in all, The Coombe House now has a website which is fulfilling its objectives.

The new website has also solved another problem for The Coombe House. The home needed a new promotional brochure and, instead of producing an expensive printed hard copy version, a downloadable PDF has been generated instead. Now prospective residents and their families can simply visit the website and download the brochure. The brochure can be kept up-to-date, and is immediately available instead of waiting for hard copies to be delivered by post.

Marian concludes: "Karen didn’t impose her ideas on us. She gave us suggestions and helped us choose what we wanted for the website. She was very cooperative and helpful."

The Coombe House is a family run residential care home in Streatley-on-Thames, West Berkshire, set in an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Coombe House caters for 24 older residents who can no longer live independently or who choose not to live alone.