RSM International - a truly global presence
RSM had been a valued client of ours since 2013. When in 2015 they began their global roll-out of their new corporate brand, and we were delighted and honoured to be brought into the process right from the very beginning.
RSM had been a valued client of ours since 2013. When in 2015 they began their global roll-out of their new corporate brand we were delighted and honoured to be brought into the process right from the very beginning.
We cannot over-emphasise the importance of involving your digital agency early in these matters; we were able to consult on matters relating most especially to SEO, site management (both central and local), goal conversion and brand consistency early enough that decisions relating to these key items were worked into the global strategy right from the outset.
The decision reached was to launch over 80 sites in one day, all on the Drupal Open Source platform, managed from one central code base so that any template and functionality changes could be rolled-out across all the local sites at once (subject to our stringent testing and deployment processes).
As well as the obvious scale of this project challenges included an aggressive timeline, multiple site languages, maintaining SEO rankings on the new domain structure.
The result is a clean and fast responsive collection of sites that will feature heavily when presenting case studies and portfolio work to new prospects and clients, and a relationship with a client that we value very highly as we move to new phases of deployment and app development.
Going forward we now support over 130 of RSM’s site administrators in multiple time zones around the world.
Visit the RSM website here >>
The British Antique Dealers' Association
The requirements BADA have of us vary enormously over the years; they host and manage one of the largest and most prestigious annual Fine Arts & Antique Fairs in the UK.
The requirements BADA have of us vary enormously through the year; they host and manage one of the largest and most prestigious annual Fine Arts & Antique Fairs in the UK.
We designed & built their Fair website some years ago and since then have assisted with their entire business processes in terms of ticket management, press release propagation and content marketing.
We wrote their Social Media strategy and assist and action when required to do so… which in the run up to the big March show is a great deal!
We've now built their new Association site (www.bada.org) - a hefty resource of thousands of objects uploaded by hundreds of their member dealers and presented through an intuitive and elegant faceted search interface, and integrated their previous BADA Fair site in too.
Memories of The Royal Albert Hall to celebrate 150 years!
We decided to build the Royal Albert Memories site to allow people to share those stories, bringing them all together in one place rather than just siloed on the various social media platforms.
The Royal Albert Hall and we have worked on a number of projects over the years, and in 2017 we started brainstorming ideas for their 150th year in 2021. Peter Blake’s mural already celebrated the diversity of artists who have graced their stage, and we all agreed that showcasing the audiences would be the next step in celebrating the legacy of the Hall. Anyone who has been to an event at this iconic venue will have a story to tell, often accompanied by a photograph, some video or a ticket stub. We decided to build the Royal Albert Memories site to allow people to share those stories, bringing them all together in one place rather than just siloed on the various social media platforms.
Originally the plan was to simply present a body of “memories” of the hall as submitted by visitors online. The means of submission, and the manner of on-site presentation was very much open to discussion and it wasn’t long before 3B came up with some fun ideas.
We knew we wanted an easy way for the public to add content to the site, and for it to integrate social media as well as uploaded content easily. We needed to allow text and photos via upload, and anything else by pasting a link to a social object such as a Tweet or Instagram post for automatic embedding. We integrated embed.ly which offers over 700 social networks and external sites for hosting such assets.
We have huge experience in managing and presenting information from large and often ancient and unwieldy databases - a challenge we never shy from and this was no exception; a number of internal meetings led us to the conclusion that these memories needed to be aligned with a database of past events at the Hall.
Thankfully the Hall had just such a database - it already served the Hall’s archive pages on the site - but it was quite antiquated in its set up and needed a “deep clean” to render it usable for our purposes… but it was a great start!
Design was less of a challenge; the Hall has a well established and distinct set of brand guidelines that ensures the site we built sits comfortably within the family of satellite sites that orbit royalalberthall.com. Our main UX challenge was ensuring that site visitors could easily find where and how to browse memories and events and leave their own submissions, linked to the appropriate event.
The results are something we’re hugely proud of - and something that’s been ready for launch for some time, waiting until this year (2021) when the Hall can announce its plans to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
The Watercolour World - a truly immersive experience
A genuinely fascinating and engaging project, this; a presentation of a database of painted works so immersive and layered as to hold our professional and personal attention pretty much solidly for the last 7 months.
A genuinely fascinating and engaging project; a presentation of a database of painted works so immersive and layered as to hold our attention solidly for the last 6 months of 2018.
The Watercolour World is a UK Charity set up specifically to digitally document as many global pre-photography documentary watercolours as they can realistically lay their hands on - an ongoing (and hopefully never ending) project to preserve these academically invaluable assets for future generations.
Watercolour World were already one website into their lifecycle when they came to us; it had become apparent that theirs was a proposition with considerable “heft” - that delivery of their content, and the many and varied means by which that content should be navigated, required calling in the big boys (us) to deliver their rapidly expanding database of high-resolution artworks through an intuitive and engaging website.
This was a rapidly developing proposition in terms of scope and technology; the commissioned Minimum Viable Product very quickly became something quite polished and slick - not least because of the technology we chose to employ to deliver key assets and facilitate search.
By the time of launch The Watercolour World took delivery of a fully functioning online database of many tens of thousands of stunning paintings - all indexed and searchable by numerous means; tags, fields and of course the marvellous map.
RSM - Stunning Interactive Page To Become A Simple "Touch Screen" App
This single page interface we recently deployed on the RSM Global site has proved extremely popular and successful. We were delighted to see it being demonstrated to their Internationally dispersed members & employees during their recent World Conference.
This single page interface we recently deployed on the RSM Global site has proved extremely popular and successful. We were delighted to see it being demonstrated to their Internationally dispersed members & employees during their recent World Conference.
A nice example of how a responsive and accessible site (that is optimised to work on phones and tablets) can also serve as a large format touch screen interface... we love that!
Motor Sport Magazine new site template & content migration
The "End Game", or at least the beginning of the "End Game" as regards the "digital unification" programme for Motor Sport Magazine has been to migrate the pre-existing content from Wordpress to the new Drupal installation.
The "End Game", or at least the beginning of the "End Game" as regards the "digital unification" programme for Motor Sport Magazine has been to migrate the pre-existing content from Wordpress to the new Drupal installation.
The result has been a truly unified digital presence that now encompasses the entire Motor Sport content offering on one consistent & elegant template, allowing for a uniquely diverting & immersive browsing experience.
Ongoing we'll be looking to bring aspects of their shop and subscription pages within this new design, as well as an active monthly programme of site improvements, but for now the extraordinary wealth of expert content is brilliantly navigable - we're proud of this work!
Motor Sport magazine's Archive resource
The latest feature in the on-going “unification” programme for the Motor Sport magazine website(s) is the restyling of their mammoth archive resource – every issue of the magazine going back to it’s inception in the 1920s lovingly scanned, OCR’d and annotated is now delivered in the fully-responsive and beautiful new template we designed for their Database in August 2015.
The latest feature in the on-going “unification” programme for the Motor Sport magazine website(s) is the restyling of their mammoth archive resource – every issue of the magazine going back to it’s inception in the 1920s lovingly scanned, OCR’d and annotated is now delivered in the fully-responsive and beautiful new template we designed for their Database in August 2015.
Our love for the sport aside was there ever an online resource so immersive as this? We feel very strongly that we’ve delivered one of the great digital time-wasters of recent times… if, that is, you consider being engrossed in this wonderful body of work a waste of time!
This project forms phase 2 of a our strategy to get Motor Sport magazine’s entire online presence onto one unified template… watch this space!
The Gramophone Magazine "Conversion Layer"
Some projects, especially where measurable & quantifiable ROIs are key, require an extended “Discovery Phase” during which existing analytics and user journeys can be poured over and strategies extrapolated, and this is especially true of any project specifically involving “Conversion Optimisation”.
Some projects, especially where measurable & quantifiable ROIs are key, need an extended “Discovery Phase” during which existing analytics and user journeys can be pored over and strategies extrapolated. This is especially true of any project involving “Conversion Optimisation”.
The challenge faced with Gramophone was to identify exactly where potential subscribers were dropping off during the existing conversion path – a simple process of exporting and combining analytics data and identifying clicks (or lack of them) and comparing against changes we could make to the client’s site.
When you can combine intelligent assumptions and creative guesswork with hard data wonderful things can happen, and the first thing we thought of turned out to be key in turning around the conversion figures.
We knew there were site visitors who were keen to subscribe but it was clear that their enthusiasm was being tested by the enormous amount of text explaining the various subscriber options, and the number of clicks required along the conversion path.
Step 1 of an ongoing process was to design and deploy a block on every single page on their site that we came to know as our “conversion layer”; a simple and elegant table of options that, coupled with hover-state information and clear text, has simplified the process by which subscribers are informed.
Subscriber numbers have shot up as a result and we can start to think about a broader SEO strategy that will feed this now-efficient sales funnel.
Motor Sport Magazine Database
Every now and then a job comes our way that very quickly becomes a “labour of love” for us. The Motor Sport Magazine database is one such project and we are just delighted with the work and our new client.
Every now and then a job comes our way that very quickly becomes a “labour of love” for us. The Motor Sport Magazine database is one such project and we are just delighted with the work and our new client.
The work involved developing an online interface for an enormous - and growing – database of motor racing results and statistics going back to the very dawn of the sport!
We certainly felt well suited to the task; aside from Alex’s enthusiasm for the sport, our Lead Developer, Jordan Worner, is also a huge fan. Jordan & Alex’s ability to make key decisions regarding usability and data delivery from a fan’s perspective were key to this project’s success.
The site that is now live stands very much as a “work-in-progress” and should be used and considered a Beta version, but the experience is extraordinary; a deeply immersive journey through a wealth of fascinating statistics and dynamic comparative tables — take a look & enjoy!
