Our News | Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

Royal Fireworks Press

Royal Fireworks Press is an established publisher of books for gifted children. Their new site serves as a catalogue and e-commerce portal, and incorporates two different versions: one for school-based learning, and another for home-based. Users can switch between these two modes, which share content, but also contain pages and information unique to each version.

Royal Fireworks Press is our most popular e-commerce website, of which we are proud. Since the re-design the website has experienced a 14% increase in sales, which we predict will continue to rise. The site provides functionality, good visual layout and is highly ranked in search engines, all encouraging customers to buy books for gifted children.

The site was developed using CodeIgniter PHP Framework, with customised WordPress CMS, Mal’s e-commerce and Issuu integration.

Link Agency

Link Agency is a letting agent in Hull. The website integrates with CFP WinMan.

The letting agents site was designed by 7nine and coded by Semlyen IT.

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We are proud to announce our new Limited company: Castlegate IT. Over the years the company has been expanding and progressing, and to incorporate was the next step.

It is taking time to administrate the switchover, so we are currently still trading as Semlyen IT Consultants. There will be a new website and new branding coming soon, but with the same quality of service.

To help with the workload, Castlegate IT has employed two extra staff, John Hughes and Gemma Bason.

John has extensive experience in design, HTML, CSS and Javascript coding, with a particular strength in interface design which will be a wonderful additional to Castlegate IT.

I (Gemma) have joined to help with all the company admin and to take on updates and alterations to sites.

We still have the old team – Andy, Richard, Jamie, Daniel and Jim are all here to make your website a success!!

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Chartered Surveyors Barry Crux & Co have a long-established reputation as one of the top independent commercial property agents in the North of England. Here in York they are stalwarts of the local business community and the leading independent agent for city-centre business property. They manage sales and lettings of hotels, B&Bs, restaurants and pubs in the hospitality sector, as well as office, retail and industrial properties. They also have a thriving business in the residential lettings market.

Their website was in need of an overhaul, and we were very glad to be commissioned to give it a makeover and improve their online property catalogue. We think the design is one of our best so far.

This is a business with many strings to its bow – from business appraisals to expert witness reports, EPCs and property valuations – and the site had to reflect that. As well as showing off their many and varied professional services they wanted to be able to show off the range of properties for which they are agents. Many of these are beautiful historic residential properties in the centre of York, owned by York Conservation Trust.

Their old website had been operating faithfully for years, and we were able to work with the previous developers to export and transfer their existing catalogue into the updated system that we had built. This saved them an enormous amount of time.

We also developed a system which creates informal user accounts – in order to view full PDF property particulars people have to enter some brief contact details. This only happens once per visitor, so it isn’t too obtrusive, and no subsequent logging in is required. We hasten to add, of course, that no contact details are passed to any third party, it simply allows the company to be able to report on the level of interest shown in the properties and businesses being offered for sale to their clients.

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My Health Today is a survey website set up to collect data on people’s experience of their own health. Using a system called EQ-5D, developed by the EuroQoL Group, it produces a measurement of health in terms of five different areas: mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain and discomfort, and anxiety and depression.

The bespoke programming used to create the online survey does several things – it adds the data to a database which holds all of the information (collected for research purposes), and using this data it produces charts showing the health of all participants so far. It also indicates how the current participant’s health compares to that of all the past participants. Around 33,000 results from earlier subjects were included before the website was launched, so test results can really be measured against the population as a whole.

The survey was commissioned by Professor Paul Kind from the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. Professor Kind is a leading researcher in health outcomes, involved in investigating people’s experiences of health and wellbeing. The EQ-5D tool is becoming established as a way of offering a more meaningful measurement than the simple presence or absence of disease. There is a lot of potential for delivering this online, and we’re looking forward to being able to tell you more in the future!

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A new additional to our e-commerce portfolio is an online shop for artificial lawn specialists Lawns for Lifestyles. Artificial grass is a niche product which is gaining popularity with busy professionals, elderly people and people unable to maintain a lawn for health reasons.

As lawns don’t come in standard shapes and sizes, the online shop system features some bespoke programming so that people can order the right amount of artificial grass with ease. It has a built-in calculator, which adds up the total square metres and cost of the artificial grass according to figures entered by the customer. To ensure customers can purchase just the right amount of artificial lawn, visitors to the website can add as many pieces of grass as they require, and specify the individual dimensions of each piece.

There are four different grades of artificial grass ranging from budget to luxury, and the company also offers a lawn installation service. The shop also stocks a variety of landscape design products.

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