We’ve reached the end of 2016 feeling very jolly. We’ve had a year fuelled with an array of different technical projects, delivering solutions which make organisations more efficient and solving challenges which are unique to them.
This has been a year where we’ve really had the opportunity to flex our technical muscles, using our experience and expertise to deliver projects which make our hearts beat faster and our smiles grow wider. Technology and great customer service is what we are all about.
So as we are feeling jolly and festive, we thought we’d deliver our final blog of the year with the help of some of our favourite Christmas carols!
Driving efficiency into organisations through the web technology we build really excites us. This year, we’ve delivered some intriguing projects.
MyBarrister is an online search service for clients needing barristers. Our brief was to deliver a custom built CRM which helps agents take enquiries from the website and field phone calls. An iPhone and Android app supports this by allowing clients to easily search for barristers and catch up with legal news. All in all a well integrated system with Drupal at its core helping the business manage its processes effectively.
For the world famous Univ College, Oxford, and Christ’s College, Cambridge, we focused on work flow projects taking paper-based processes online to drive efficiency.
Websites don’t exist in a silo. Sometimes organisations need to use their content in multiple places online. For two research groups at the University of Oxford we are working on syndicating content across related websites. This saves time and resources for stretched staff.
Interactive content on websites is increasingly important for user engagement and was a significant part of our workload in 2016. Colleges in Oxford want to bring their buildings to life for prospective students. Attractive maps and overlays of information do this for St Hilda's College, Oxford, and Mansfield College, Oxford.
The world-renowned Kyoto Prize awards three laureates each year who have contributed significantly to scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. Our brief was to create a tactile interface for their Oxford website and to ensure it worked for live-streaming in the future.
For communication agency Cooney Bains we created a beautiful flowing website with stylish, interactive drop down light bulbs. This animates their online brand in a slick and interesting way.
Well, we might not be able to rustle up some snow this Christmas but we can design and deliver sophisticated search functionality as we did for both NAG and Young Lives earlier this year solving the problem of quickly giving users insight into their online publications and documentation.
We also built and delivered a shiny new website for The Oxford Preservation Trust, making their popular Oxford Open Doors event more accessible online.
Our backgrounds are in big, global corporations. In our careers, we are proud to say that we’ve pretty much seen and done it all in the world of web technology and so we are dab hands at getting under the skin of an organisation and fast. We use these skills in all sorts of ways, but they are especially useful in ensuring that our clients are presenting themselves in the best possible way online. This means ensuring the content, flow, navigation and technology all reflect the organisation, deliver what is required and appeal to the target audience.
We undertook such a task for Young Lives earlier this year. Young Lives is an international study of childhood poverty following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India (in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam over 15 years. Its aim is to shed light on the drivers and impacts of child poverty, and generate evidence to help policymakers design programmes that make a real difference to poor children and their families. With a tonne of very useful data and multiple audiences with different needs, the challenge was how to present this data on line and reach all the different audiences effectively. We popped our thinking caps on and soon got to grips with how best to segment the website, present all the data on the site and enable the multi-faceted audience to access what they needed quickly without being swamped by information that they didn’t need.
For the Department of International Development, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and The Queen’s College, Oxford, we presented their history, personality, aims and beliefs through content on rich, deep sites.
Last but no means least, Drupal 8 launched this year. Although it may have felt like a headache for some of our clients who needed to upgrade onto newer versions of Drupal - for us techy types it is a leap in technological advancement and in security.
So for Olamalu, reflecting on the year that is ending - it is the season to be jolly.
We hope that you too have enjoyed a year full of challenge, interesting projects and are feeling jolly in this season of goodwill.
We’d like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.