Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

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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G-commerce company Beacon Dodsworth have made some of their applications available as web apps, meaning that their technology can be integrated into a website. You can try out some demos of their applications on their website.

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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We have been finding ourselves turning more and more to WordPress to meet our Content Management needs. Over the past couple of years it has outgrown its ‘blogging software’ roots and become a fully fledged content management system in its own right, being awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.

We would like to showcase two of our most recent websites that make good use of WordPress: Golden Bough, Intellectual Property Solutions and Precious Cargo, a sub site of The Laurence Sterne Trust.

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