Website Design Your 'Shop front' to the World
We know the Internet back-to-front. Tenretni. See. Designing and developing attractive, usable and accessible websites is what we started doing and it's what we've been doing for over 12 years. We've worked for major financial institutions (boo! hiss!) and we've worked for small, local businesses but regardless of size, we most enjoy and tend to work for people who are passionate about what they do and - in whatever way - contribute to the social good.
Please scroll down for some examples of our websites ...
Educational & Charitable Websites
Darwin & Evolution
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, Christ's College in Cambridge wanted to launch a website that presented an introduction and overview of Darwin and his work to the average member of the public. We created the visual identity, the design and build a multi-tiered admin system for the numerous editors they had working on the project.
www.christs.cam.ac.uk/darwin200
Romanian Challenge
Romanian Challenge is the home of the O Noua Viata charity, which works with the government and child protection agencies in Romania to improve the lives of young people who were once institutionalised in orphanages and similar. This project involved a complete overhaul of an ancient website, a new visual identity and logo and we also built a user-friendly content management system for the slightly computer-averse site admins.
www.romanian-challenge.org
Emmaus
Emmaus is a leading homeless charity operating throughout the UK on a unique 'franchise' basis. Emmaus communities need an initial cash injection to start, but once they're running, they are self-sufficient, providing homes and jobs for homeless people, with the added benefit that they recycle donated furniture and other goods. We're regular visitors to the local Cambridge Emmaus so being asked to do this large redesign project was a real pleasure. This was a technically complex job, involving a multi-tiered admin system, with content being shared across the main UK site and various Emmaus "minisites". Read the Emmaus testimonial
www.emmaus.org.uk
Department of Urology
We received quite a complex brief to redesign the self-contained website of the Department of Urology at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. Previously, information was hard to find, the content was organised in a slightly ad-hoc way and no content management system meant they had to rely on the one person who knew how to edit the website's content. We took all this information and re-organised it to make a site that was as informative and helpful to GPs as it was to prospective patients. As a bonus, it also became a useful teaching aid - check out the quizzes for medical students. Following the success of the Camurology site, we were asked to design the Prostate Cancer Research initiative that was being launched as a collaborative programme by eight different universities in the UK.
www.camurology.org.uk
Local Business Websites
MM Equine
Mike McCoy is a horse trainer, specialising in colt starting and problem horses. He trained under Ken McNabb in Wyoming for three years and started MM Equine upon his return to the UK. Mike has a grounded philosophy in training horses and he wanted a non-fussy website that reflected his pragmatic approach. The result is a clean, simple-looking site, yet with subtle embellishments that take advantage of some new web technologies. Check out the windswept clouds in the header!
www.mmequine.com
TerrorBull Games
Director of Digital Spoke, Andrew Sheerin, also co-founded a satirical games publishing company, TerrorBull Games (apologies for the bad pun). Not surprisingly, we do all their design for them, which includes websites for each major release. Check out the website for War on Terror, the boardgame and Crunch, the game for utter bankers.
www.terrorbullgames.co.uk
City View
We seem to have a habit of developing community-centred listings websites. First there was We're All Neighbours, then the Local Tourism Office and now City View is the latest newcomer, offering an extra ingredient: a comprehensive local business database. This was a pretty massive project, involving serious amounts of scribbling on paper before any coding even started. Behind the scenes, business users can log in and add content to their own microsites. Regular users can log in and add event and small ads. While City View staff can add editorial and promote whichever bits of submitted content they feel are of interest.
www.cityviewed.co.uk
herga
Herga are a local - but world-leading - designers and manufacturers of electrical switches. Being primarily concerned with electrical switches, they won't mind me saying that they are normally rather conservative in their tastes. So when we presented them with a monochrome, crazy-angled website design, they took some convincing. Happily, though, they not only went with it, they embraced the look and it fed into other aspects of their visual identity. Now they're heading up Google and they have a website that stands out from the competition. This design has lasted them over 4 years and they have no intention of changing it any time soon.
www.herga.com
John Harris the Storyteller
John Harris is one of only a handful of professional, full-time storytellers in this country. He came to us wanting a redesign of his site. Although broadly happy with his old site, he wasn't able to update the content himself and he hardly appeared on Google. With a new book coming out, this was a major problem. We brightened things up with some help from Tom Morgan-Jones's illustrations and now he's no.1 in Google for "professional storyteller". Nice.
www.johnharristhestoryteller.com
Artists' & Musicians' Websites
Inkymess
Tom Morgan-Jones is a highly talented illustrator - he specialises in children's books, but also cuts a mean line in political satire. We have always been impressed with Tom's work (you'll see evidence of collaborations with Tom all through this site!), so it was a joy to design his website for him. There's not much to it if we're honest - just a minimal design that really lets Tom's inkings take centre stage, where they belong. Of course we also built an easy-to-use content management system that even Tom "Where's-the-on-switch?" Morgan-Jones (that's really how he refers to himself) was comfortable with.
Read the Inkymess.com testimonial.
www.inkymess.com
Western Suburbs
It's a real shame they're not around any more, but Western Suburbs were a band with a vision. Their music, performances, videos, artwork and website were all threads in a complex tapestry of stories and narratives. They were like the David Lynch of alt. country. Their inclusion here is more to show the limits to which CSS can be pushed. The design was graphics heavy and pretty radical when it first appeared back in 2004.
Screenshot of WS website
Michael Collins, Clarinettist
Michael Collins is an internationally acclaimed clarinettist. He is known particularly for his performances of contemporary composers, such as John Adams and Erkki-Sven Tüür. When he approached us for a new website, we took the opportunity to break the 'sombre, austere' mould of other professional classical musician sites. Recently, his PR company had a change of heart and moved him back into the "look serious" camp, but for a few years he had a pretty unique website that garnered no small amount of attention and praise.
Screenshot of MC website
Random Testimonial
I would highly recommend Digital Spoke to anyone who requires a website which not only looks good and works well, but is tailored to their individual needs and enhances their business in the best way possible.
