A few examples of our work
It’s probably not too surprising that prospective new clients are also considering how their current website performs, when they think of adding video.
We have just started to market the services we offer and everyone so far considering video is also considering either a new site or work on their current one too.
So this post is simply here to show the three sites we’ve just built for clients and two older ones from my old programming company that are still live. The latter two are now over four years old and still performing well.
Writing this post has coincided with a tangible reason to have a company capable of good programming host and manage your site, as well as possibly build, if you want to run video.
We had an issue this morning with the Apple Safari browser not loading videos that were set to be run only on specific domains. This is down to an issue where the iframe does not send a referrer header with Safari when using the lazy load function, it only affects Safari and is just something you have to be aware of.
Today, this affected both our video hosts, possibly down to a security upgrade at our server, and we were able to make changes to the lazy load software to compensate, and our videos were back live within an hour.
The most recent site built is True Self Liberation a site for a therapeutic life coach. The site is fully built and has four test videos added but isn’t being promoted yet. Willow is moving house and we will shoot new clips when she has everything set up and ready to go. We will then start to optimise both the site and videos for London where she lives but also in NY where she also has a number of clients and is looking to build her business.
The second site is Touch Ironmongery in Fulham. Touch has been a client for many years but early this year one of their main suppliers offered them the opportunity to add 3500 of their products to the website with full descriptions and highly detailed photographs.
Initially I had expected this to be a feed into the site but no, we were asked to add each product into our catalogue and to optimise them ourselves.
The only issue was that the database holding the images and links to the images was written in Magento to match the suppliers site and our site is built in WordPress.
The two systems are not compatible but as you will see from the 5th site in this list, that wasn’t going to stop us.
We previously took a huge site for Eyediology in London and converted it to WordPress and linked to their Amazon store.
We rewrote the database to make compatible and added each product to the Touch site, we also built a ‘digital lake’ with Amazon web services and copied the entire image library there, so that they load fast and in high quality.
Rewriting the entire database has also given us the opportunity to add SEO throughout for each product, including key words, descriptions and alt text, for images. We have localised the products and are at the top of any search in Fulham or Chelsea and top 5 most searches in London.
The database is nearly complete and then we will move onto to video to talk about the service, design capabilities and bespoke products that make Touch unique.
The third new site is for Gabucci who again we’ve worked with for a number of years.
The Gabucci site has been developed to sell high quality menswear online but also to encourage new customers visit the store and to get over the message that the suits and jackets are pretty much bespoke, as made for the store from their choice of materials and finishes.
We add new videos twice a year talking about the services, in particular the cloths, their wedding service and reducing their impact on the environment.
We have also just started a weekly blog on the site and on Instagram talking about local events in music and the arts and though it began to suggest colourful shirts for festivals, it is now gaining momentum with customers and concentrating more on the actual events.
Prior to the pandemic, the aim of the site was just to bring customers through the doors, but since it began we’ve concentrated on bringing new customers to the site and now again to the store. We see visitor numbers grow in the hundreds and sometimes in the thousands each month and as we attract a younger audience too, the vast majority are viewing on mobile and the latest site really took advantage of that.
This is possibly not recent but was one of the last sites built by my old programming firm, and four or maybe five years on is still live.
We did a lot of filming for J A Burke but I think that has all gone from their site now, but they asked us build a site for them to show it and this site was built in an early version of Gutenberg, WordPress’s own content management system. It was good then but has come on massively since then and we would still choose for certain sites. It is very programmer friendly.
J A Burke are a large groundworks company in Birmingham that mainly work in conjunction with other developers, preparing the site and foundations for large industrial and retail buildings.
Once we completed the filming, we passed the completed site to a local web company to manage.
Finally, another site built in 2017/8 and still live. This is one my programmer and I were hugely proud of. We were given a design to follow and asked to turn two huge Magento sites into a single WordPress one, link via Linnworks to their warehouse and databases and to their Amazon store. Key to the brief was to retain 1000 backlinks from the old site and to reduce the load time from over 7 seconds to under three.
We achieved all of that and also introduced multiple 3 dimensional revolves of glasses, which are still on the site.
At the time there was quite a lot of competition to complete a working Woo Commerce/Linnworks integration between bigger international programming firms. I’m pretty certain ours was up and live before the winners!
At the conclusion of the project we handed the site over to Eyediology to manage in house.
Our own site is worth mentioning as it is a hybrid construction combining WordPress Gutenberg for its overall structure with Elementor blocks embedded within.
This gives us a lot of flexibility to add any custom code as required but as it requires greater maintenance too, it is more suited to businesses needing bespoke functionality.
Whatever your requirements are, hopefully we can help.
