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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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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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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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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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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P² People & Places geodemographic people classification is an application that shows demographics by postcode. It uses their tree and branch lifestyle classifications, which describes groups from “Mature Oaks” to “Urban Challenge”, each with a number of ‘branches’ within them. These types are defined by a variety of factors including age, wealth and cultural background. On the free version you only get to see the various ‘trees’ for postcodes in your search area, with a different colour circle used to represent the types of people who live around your search area.

As well as being an interesting insight into how birds of a feather flock together, knowing the demographics of different areas is crucial when deciding where to locate say a branch of a retail chain. For example, a vegan café would probably work best in an area that was mainly in the New Starters and Qualified Metropolitans trees (characterised by many graduates who have a keen interest in healthy eating). A Bingo hall would be more likely to be successful in an area that was mainly in the Disadvantaged Households and Urban Challenge trees (poorer, ageing communities). The P² application provides a fast, comprehensible overview of each area, which can save a lot of time when analysing data in order to make such decisions.

Businesses with multiple branches can take advantage of another application, “Where’s My Nearest…?” which, as its name suggests, allows customers to find their nearest branches based on their postcode. The demonstration version shows users the location of their nearest football club, but the app can be customised to show a business’ own outlets – e.g. banks, supermarkets, or garden centres.

SEO

The Beacon Dodsworth site runs on the Expression Engine CMS. We’ve recently been working with them to improve the SEO on this site. Rather than just doing all the SEO ourselves as we usually do, we’ve been guiding Beacon Dodsworth staff through the process of looking at the site’s statistics, and working out which key phrases the pages should be optimised for. As all of the SEO content can be managed within the CMS, it means they can adjust this as they discover which phrases work the best and generate the most organic search engine traffic (rather than traffic from targeted Google Ads).

The products which have been targeted in this recent SEO campaign are the GIS mapping software, driving time and distance calculator, route planning software and postcode areas and boundaries data.

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The car park provides 24 hour access to its secure premises in the Q-Park complex on Kent Street, and customers receive a dedicated Named space and personal transponder. There are even a few extras thrown in with the parking contracts, such as meals at the nearby York Pavilion Hotel and Langton’s Brasserie.

In other news, the new e-commerce site for Andrew’s Golf is now live – you can read more about this golf accessories shop in my earlier post. Another recent development is the Shandy Hall online gift shop, which is now fully operational on the website for the Laurence Sterne Trust.

Glamping site Jollydays Luxury Camping have just commissioned a major project for their online booking and payment system, and the gifted education publishers Royal Fireworks Press have asked us to use Issuu to provide sample pages for the books available on their site.

On the SEO side of things, organic children’s clothing retailers Twigs4Kids have commissioned some additional work. Having obtained a no. 1 position on google.co.uk for the search “organic children’s clothes”, their next target is to improve their positions for the named brands that they stock. The first two that we’ll be working on are Frugi and Little Shrimp.

The next sites in line for us to build are a new site for York estate agents Nigel Naish, and an online outlet for York curtain shop L & G Adams.

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Shandy Hall in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, was the home of 18th Century vicar, novelist and celebrity Laurence Sterne. It is now a public museum, housing a collection of his work. It also incorporates a gift shop, garden, and the beginnings of Asterisk*, which, when fully-fledged, will be a workshop space for artists, writers and technologists.

The website developed by Semlyen IT for the Laurence Sterne Trust features an online shopping cart enabling site visitors to purchase items from the Shandy Hall shop. As well as physical items, they can also buy Shandy Hall membership packages from the website. The site also features alongside the shopping cart, a bespoke events and exhibitions management system.

This site was designed by Bivouac.

EMDR Extra

This is a brochure site for EMDR Extra, an organisation offering training workshops to mental health practitioners working with psychological trauma. EMDR is a technique used to treat conditions resulting from trauma, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The site features an online application and booking form, which includes payment processing by PayPal.

This site was designed by Jamie at Semlyen IT.

McCartney Lettings

York letting agents McCartney Lettings commissioned this new property management site, which integrates a bespoke property details administration system. McCartney Lettings are a new agent and their new website will help attract the attention of more landlords.

Designed by Andy at Semlyen IT.

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