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.
A new database resource site for "Whispering" Bob Harris!
Database sites are beasts. By definition they grow, and by design they are adaptable and endlessly re-interpretable. They require a depth of imagination and technical acumen to design properly, as well as no small amount of bravery (to take on) that only comes with experience.
Anyone who knows 3B also knows we are a group that really LOVES our music! Our development and marketing teams are almost entirely musicians of varying skill and aptitude and the hysterically tone-deaf Bremer brothers invariably donate most of their disposable income to live music events.
We’ve also, over the years, garnered considerable experience and expertise in delivering sites that leverage large and often unwieldy historical databases and dynamic content.
Put these 2 essential factors together and it seemed only natural and right that when we’d discovered that our great broadcasting “hero”, Robert Brinley Joseph “Whispering Bob” Harris, OBE, had unhappily retired his colossal database of past show playlists and running orders, we should step in!
Bob was delighted to hear from us, and we were equally delighted to have the opportunity to meet the great man himself. And he didn’t disappoint; I always say you should never meet your heroes (I also always say you shouldn’t call people heroes unless they’ve recently pulled a handful of kittens out of a burning building, but I do it anyway) but Bob is exactly what you’d hope he’d be - charming, chatty & very very happy to regale with his many stories… ideas for projects and schemes abound!
But first the database - a huge resource of songs, photos, artists and the like that needed seriously sorting and sifting. One of 3B’s founders, Adam Belson, was quick to volunteer his expertise in recommending that we build the database using React - an open source javascript library we’d not worked with before despite our many forays into Big Data. I was delighted that one of our developers, Stoyan, was excited and keen to use React and so he was assigned to this project.
Database sites are beasts. By definition they grow, and by design they are adaptable and endlessly re-interpretable. They require a depth of imagination and technical acumen to design properly, as well as no small amount of bravery (to take on) that only comes with experience. But what they need most is an obsessive eye for detail and accuracy. At 3B we often talk of taking on “hostile” databases; fields and fields of cells that are inconsistent, inaccurate or incomplete, and what always astonishes me is how Jack Bremer fizzes with excitement whenever he gets his teeth into this sort of data. His tricks and techniques for ferreting out date inaccuracies and the like leave me boggled every time, and this database was no exception.
Suffice to say that, nearly a year after this project was first discussed, we finally launched this new resource today (19th August 2020) - on the occasion of Bob’s 50th Anniversary in radio broadcasting. Like any great database this will grow, evolve and be subject to revision and, no doubt, corrections - and we are so excited to see the thing released into the wild!
“I am so happy to have partnered with 3B Digital and so excited to launch our new Bob Harris site on the 50th anniversary of my first ever radio programme.
Working with Alex, Jack and the 3B team is proving to be a joy and an education. I am in awe of their phenomenal work ethic and extremely proud of the resource we are creating and building. Navigating the site is simple and enjoyable and the depth of information 3B have compiled is absolutely awesome. Friends have been telling me that they have been happily searching the archive for hours on end.
It has taken more than a year of collaboration to reach this moment and we are all thrilled with the results. And this is just the beginning. Over the next few months the site will grow as we pour more and more information online for you to explore and enjoy.”
Bob Harris, OBE
Take a look at the work yourself; if you have even a casual interest in, or knowledge of, classic rock, pop and / or country music we hope you’ll find something here to enjoy.
Visit the new site at archive.bobharris.org/.
A new Squarespace 7.1 site for Purdie Pascoe
The challenge here was to transpose the look and feel of an existing Joomla site that we'd built for PP years previously onto what can be a fairly restrictive template (at least in terms of complete layout and styling freedom).
Purdie Pascoe is a medical devices market research company with a truly global reach. As clients, friends and neighbours here in Battersea, they’ve been trusting us to take care of their Digital Marketing for over 10 years now.
The original Squarespace challenge - a few years ago now - was to transpose the look and feel of an existing Joomla site that we'd built for PP some years previously onto what can sometimes be a fairly restrictive template (at least in terms of complete layout and styling freedom).
The client quite rightly wanted to enjoy their existing design but with an easier and more intuitive CMS as well as decreased maintenance and hosting costs and what we achieved was a near perfect facsimile of their previous site (whose design the client was very attached to) without having to resort to too many CSS and Javascript overrides
Since then Squarespace has moved on leaps and bounds and with the recent release of Squarespace 7.1 we took the opportunity to redesign and build a brand new site that benefits from better navigation and user journeys. The new site is a far simpler affair that also delivers a far more sophisticated and appropriate face for their business.
Take a look at our work here >>
“Our relationship with 3B goes back a decade. In that time we’ve grown as businesses together, and it’s been reassuring to know that 3B have been in our corner every step of the way.
A recent rebranding exercise was greeted enthusiastically by their team and we were gratified that our new ID could so easily and quickly be adopted by our site’s existing CMS.
3B are a trusted and valued addition to our marketing team.”
Stephen Potts, Director, Purdie Pascoe
RedDoor Homes - a site that features rich and dynamic content
RedDoor Homes came to us with a beautiful but a very slow website. They explained to us their USP - creating engaging video content to help prospective & existing clients. Their portfolio includes virtual viewings, tips for landlords, tenants, homeowners; reviews of local cafes, restaurants & events.
Being an agile agency we always keep in mind that every website is unique and has to be closely tailored to the client’s needs.
Here at 3B, we know how to adapt our strategy and recommendations to meet the expectations of every client. However, this may be a bit challenging when it comes to working with estate agents, mainly because they often depend on a third-party tool for the property listing.
Quite often, estate agents employ a property listings widget embedded on their site. The problem with these widgets is that they are often not SEO friendly. Some of them display within an iframe - meaning that the properties do not have unique URLs and therefore can not be shared.
RedDoor Homes came to us with a beautiful but a very slow website. They explained to us their USP - creating engaging video content to help prospective & existing clients. Their portfolio includes virtual viewings, tips for landlords, tenants, homeowners; reviews of local cafes, restaurants & events.
To make the best recommendation possible we conducted the full SEO & Site performance audit. The audit revealed a handful of potential improvements. Starting from some pages not being responsive on mobile to missing metadata and having 6 Google Analytics codes connected to the site. All that aside our biggest concern with the RedDoor homes website remained the site being incredibly slow, on both, desktop and mobile.
This often happens with large websites; many people think having a website is enough and they tend to focus more on content management and forget about general maintenance and the optimisation of user journeys and conversions.
When talking through all areas of improvements with the client we hit a roadblock - all property listings were done through a tried party tool called ‘Expert agent’ - a tool that the client was determined to maintain despite the fact that ‘Expert agent’ embedded property listings simply weren't working for this site.
A thorough research process revealed the perfect solution - two websites unified into one online presence; a website for content management on Squarespace & a website for the property listings by ExtertAgent.
To manage brochure content we recommended Squarespace - the perfect solution for those who want to regularly update their site. The interface is very intuitive and the client does not need to have any dev knowledge at all!
When the new websites went live, we were then able to better focus on on-site SEO and especially on one of the most important elements of SEO - copywriting; producing a user-friendly & search engine optimised content.
SEO is a long process. It starts with thorough keyword research, understanding what people search for and industry trends. An optimised page should be at least 750 words long. Having said that there is no point of writing those long, well-optimised pages if people are simply not reading them. To write useful content you need to understand your website visitors and that’s where the tracking comes into play.
Google tag manager plays a very important role in understanding your website traffic, although what needs to be tracked differs from site to site. Here is what we added to the RedDoor Homes website:
Scroll depth tracking - this is key for SEO content and long term strategy. Implementing scroll depth tracking allowed us to see how much of the page people read (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). Analyzing this data helps to understand what pages people don’t find particularly interesting or easy to read - then more work can be done to make those pages perform better.
Video tracking - the site has many videos and tracking them allows us to see the videos that have been watched, which ones were the most popular if the people watch the whole video or give up halfway through.
Outbound link tracking & link clicks to services provided by RedDoor - almost every website has links to other platforms, it is important to see where people click off to from your site. In this case, we also wanted to know how many people use ‘off-site services’ such as online property valuation, repairs and maintenance platform etc.
Tracking of form submissions - allows us to see how many times people contacted RedDoor using contact forms on the website. It allows easy analysis of what pages have higher conversion rates.
Reading all this, you probably think it’s a lot to digest and not everyone is confident navigating their way through the maze of Google Analytics. Luckily, we know the most common client concerns and we don’t expect our clients to find all the information they might need all by themselves.
To that end we used Data Studio to present everything a client needs to know about their website performance in one beautiful and comprehensive report. The report includes information about the most important platforms for RedDoor - their main website, properties website and YouTube. It also includes the number of sessions, users, bounce rate, page views, number of form enquiries, new / returning visitors ratio, devices people use to browse the site, how people find the site and many more.
We are always open to suggestions, and if a client thinks that they would benefit from something extra added to the report we are keen to help.
“Choosing an agency to carry out an effective SEO strategy is tricky; optimisation seems a dark art to most of us and trust is vital - trust that the agency knows what they’re doing, and trust that they’ll actually do it!
We’ve been associates of 3B for many years now but only very recently invited them to take on our SEO and Digital marketing account. Step one was a brutal but much appreciated audit of our existing website and a recommendation that we migrate our sizable but chaotic body of content to a platform where we could collate and organise it far better in order that we more effectively convert traffic to our site and into our sales funnel.
Just a few short weeks later we had our new site - a more striking but fundamentally simpler site that’s easier to manage and, importantly, easier to market. We’re delighted.
3B are just exactly what they purport to be: a boisterous but effective agency that have our best interest at heart, leveraging their considerable experience whilst keenly adopting new technologies and methods along the way - and we trust them totally!”
Andy Wicking, Director
Visit the site here >>
Event Branding for The Africa Debate 2020
A lovely challenge, this; a branding that speaks of a geographical location can very easily become a stereotypical & patronising rendering that misses the fundamentals of the proposition… in other words, it can all very quickly look a bit “touristy”..!
A lovely challenge, this; a branding that speaks of a geographical location can very easily become stereotypical & patronising and miss the fundamentals of the proposition… in other words, it can all very quickly look a bit “touristy”..!
The Africa Debate is a flagship event of Invest Africa - a key forum, hosted in London, that brings vital decision makers and business leaders involved in the development of the Continent.
We were delighted to be invited to produce a brand ID for the show that would speak of the event’s contemporary weight and importance whilst retaining a look and feel that was clearly “of Africa”.
Accordingly our designer Greg produced a number of variations the continent’s instantly recognisable profile using colours that in anybody else’s hands can quickly become flat and tepid.
We’re delighted with the results, and more importantly so is the client!
“The 3bweb team were incredibly easy to work with and produced some excellent designs for our annual conference. They took the time to understand our brand identity and were very responsive throughout the process making sure we got a logo that reflects who we are as a company.”
Eleanor Brown, Content Manager, Invest in Africa
Visit the Africa Debate website here >>
Squarespace site launch for Robinson Kenning & Gallagher
RKG are a creative and innovative Architectural practice and so had strong but changeable views on design and presentation. Fortunately Squarespace is ideal for the rapid prototyping and deployment and ideas were implemented speedily.
Robinson Kenning & Gallagher (RKG) have been our clients since 2007 - up until very recently benefiting from an ancient but still performing Joomla CMS (a testimony to Joomla’s extraordinary robustness & longevity).
RKG are a creative and innovative Architectural practice and so had strong but changeable views on design and presentation. Fortunately Squarespace is ideal for the rapid prototyping and deployment and ideas were implemented speedily.
The result is an elegant but vibrant presentation of Case Studies and Services that we can now look to further optimise ongoing - both on and off site.
Take a look at Robinson Kenning & Gallagher’s new site here >>
Our Toggl Dashboard Reviewed
We hate timesheets, and have come to understand that most people do. They’re also boring, and not very accurate! Given that our clients always want transparency (one of our values), we knew we needed to use a system which was fun, accurate and simple to use.
Why build a custom time tracking dashboard?
We hate timesheets, and have come to understand that most people do. They’re also boring, and not very accurate! Given that our clients always want transparency (one of our values), we knew we needed to use a system which was fun, accurate and simple to use.
A beautiful solution to the timesheet problem
When our Senior Developer Matt Matterson first joined 3B we set him straight to work on our new Toggl Dashboard tool so we can see who is working on what at any time. We’d never seen anything quite like what we had in our heads so it was a real “journey of discovery” as we made up what we wanted as we went along… and we couldn’t be happier with the results! Each member of staff has their own grid-square, which is black and white if they’re not currently tracking time.
Once they start tracking, their face comes into full colour. See below
It also helps other team members to see what one another is working on, without needing to disturb them (if they have their headphones in and are ‘in flow’, for example)
This simple tools shows us the following for each team member at any moment in time.
Client
Project
Task
Project estimate / actual time
Task estimate / actual time
Non / Billable - A pound symbol if it's billable
Time tracked so far
Time passed since tracking finished
Total today
Total billable
Identifiable client and project details have been blurred
Our dashboard then runs a query every two minutes to check if a user has begun/finished tracking within the last 5 minutes. If they have then the display will refresh. To make the page load as quickly as possible, the information loads into session variables before refreshing.
If the user has not tracked within 24 hours the information will simply display how many days/weeks/months have passed.
We have integrated Zendesk, JIRA and Toggl altogether with our proprietary client dashboard, which helps us to provide seamless ticket, time and priority-management tools for our clients. If you’d like to know how we can build or connect tools like this for your company or agency, do get in touch.
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.
Representing the digital brand of the racing driver Perry McCarthy
Personal brands are understandably emotionally charged personal statements by the protagonists and digital and design agencies tread carefully where content, look and feel are concerned. But 3B saw this as a terrific opportunity to make a bold statement of intent in what is a growing market of sports personalities looking to maximise exposure online.
Perry visiting 3B in February 2019
3B are delighted to play a small part in the ongoing story of this most remarkable of professional racing drivers.
3B offered to revisit Perry’s digital presence on condition that they were trusted to build an optimised site that would deliver managed and manageable content in the most accessible way possible, ensuring site goals and conversions were optimised and tracked along the way.
Personal brands are understandably emotionally charged personal statements by the protagonists and digital and design agencies tread carefully where content, look and feel are concerned. But 3B saw this as a terrific opportunity to make a bold statement of intent in what is a growing market of sports personalities looking to maximise exposure online.
Thankfully Perry understood what we were looking to achieve here and has trusted us implicitly to deliver on our promise. The build wasn’t difficult or lengthy; we used the wonderful and increasingly configurable cloud-based CMS, Squarespace - a truly powerful and rapidly deployed platform that serves all but the most demanding brochure-site requirements. Design was very much led by the well-established Perry McCarthy brand and the high-quality images and video that he has at his disposal.
3B Digital is proud that Perry has placed this most valuable asset in our hands and we feel sure that the site at www.perrymccarthy.co.uk will help him better serve his broad and disparate interest groups.
Visit Perry’s new site here >>
A new Squarespace site for Riverside Tanker Chartering
What singles this particular project out as a deeply satisfactory Squarespace instance is that - for once - absolutely no code injection or css overrides were required; this site is absolutely standard in terms of code and template presets, and this reflected in the fact that it was delivered for less than half of the original estimated cost.
Riverside Tanker Chartering (RTC) have been clients of 3B for many years now - benefiting (up until August 2018) from a robust but ageing Joomla site we'd designed and deployed for them in 2011.
The need for a new site was clear; aside from the fact that their Joomla site pre-dated Responsive sites and mobile optimisation there remained the question of whether Joomla was in fact "overkill" for a site serving a purely "affirmatory" role.
The choice seemed simple to us; RTC's needs fell well within the native capabilities of a standard Squarespace site and they readily accepted our recommendation to move platform. Moreover Squarespace's hosting costs are considerably less than Joomla's and its need for regular security updates - in itself a hefty monthly cost - was negated altogether.
The result is a truly beautiful site - albeit one that loads quickly across all devices (notwithstanding the homepage banner video that loads independently direct from Youtube), features strong optimised images and succinct content with clear conversion paths.
What singles this particular project out as a deeply satisfactory Squarespace instance is that - for once - absolutely no code injection or css overrides were required; this site is absolutely standard in terms of code and template presets, and this reflected in the fact that it was delivered for less than half of the original estimated build cost.
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!
Air Partner's Jetcard US Microsite using Squarespace
Theirs are not the kind of customers who are willing to accept bugs or slow loading pages because their time is too valuable. For this reason we realised that Squarespace would provide the ideal backdrop for a responsive and unique theme, without compromising on the feel of the site.
When Air Partner came to us they told us briefly what they wanted:
- A site which would look completely unique.
- A site which would leave a lasting impression on their younger current and potential customers.
- A site which wouldn't also alienate their loyal customers.
We knew that they'd want an easy admin interface and Squarespace provides that in buckets so we dived straight in. The template Squarespace provided us with was completely ripped apart, reshaped and moulded into the unique site you can see today at jetcard.airpartner.com.
We kept all the features which created an immersive experience like the full width videos and images, then imprinted the unique AirPartner brand upon it.
Consider for a moment the kind of clientele suited to a private jet subscription service with the following perks:
- Guaranteed availability in as few as 24 hours' notice with no blackout dates
- Flight credit that never expires and fully-refundable account balances
- 24/7 global coverage year-round
Theirs are not the kind of customers who are willing to accept bugs or slow loading pages because their time is too valuable. For this reason we realised that Squarespace would provide the ideal backdrop for a responsive and unique theme, without compromising on the feel of the site.
Despite the designs being chopped and changed throughout the creative process we have found the perfect balance between one-of-a-kind and functional.
We look forward to working with and advising on AirPartner's greater family of sites in the years to come.
Search-optimised Shopify site delivers 2-fold traffic increase for Master Travel
It is incredibly satisfying when a product perfectly suits the clients needs, but all the more so when it delivers greater business success.
we couldn't be happier with the overwhelming success of this project which came in on-time, under budget, and consistently delivers over expectations!
The Master Travel company provide bespoke package trips for people with particular study interests; examples include healthcare, education, music and veterinary study tours.
For years everything was organised through magazine publicity, email newsletters, survey forms, and phone calls.
All their payments were managed over the phone, involving two or three phone calls per transaction. One for the deposit, one when the full payment was due, and one for any bolt-on trip perks like a double room, or additional tour.
3B suggested Shopify given the aggressive timeline and budget, plus the need for a responsive mobile site with an e-commerce emphasis.
With an in-house training session the Master Travel team were up to speed with the admin side of things within hours, adding new products, migrating old content, understanding the Shopify CRM, taking new email subscribers on, using complex Shopify add-ons, you name it.
They knew they didn't need to reinvent themselves and "go full-digital" because many of their clients still find phone conversations more secure than the internet because there's a real person on the other end.
To this end we placed a prominent banner on every page prompting every viewer to call a landline if they had any questions about a tour, without compromising on the technical ability of the Shopify site to process payments and personal information safely and securely.
It is incredibly satisfying when a product perfectly suits the clients needs, but all the more so when it delivers greater business success!
Year on year inbound traffic has grown by a massive 91%.
Courses like Early Years Education in Finland & Sweden have received over 4000 views in the 118 days since launch, equating to 35 views on average each day. This is because we designed their pages to be optimised for search with strong titles, headings and url's including the key words their target market were using to search for trips.
Incredibly, the effect of these optimised trip-specific landing pages, was the reduction of the proportion of all page views on the homepage by half, while increasing the total number of page views to the homepage by 40%.
This means more people finding the information they need directly from search results, or generally being able to find what they needed without going to the homepage. This could be down to the rich built-in search suggestion box we have on the site, and the internal search results pages.
We took best practice steps on their Google analytics account to filter out all the spam and ghost referrers (more on that here), and the IP addresses of our and their offices, which usually reduces the number of page views and sessions visible on the account. Clearly that didn't happen here!
Overall the client couldn't be happier with the overwhelming success of this project which came in on-time, under budget, and consistently delivers over expectations!
A new responsive site for St Christopher's School
We have now delivered a completely secure and up to date responsive website that truly tells the story of this delightful and inclusive south coast school whilst maintaining clear paths to conversion for prospective parents, staff & pupils alike.
As mentioned elsewhere schools can be tricky projects; design and development phases can be extraordinarily lengthy - often exacerbated by key staff holidays and large management committees.
St Christopher’s is no exception to this despite them being a long standing and highly valued client of 3B’s of whom we are very fond. Design iterations, changes and scope creep can become a real issue in any project, and is frankly something of an inevitability when taking on school sites.
Accordingly what started out as a very simply responsive template redesign came, over time, to include an update to the Joomla CMS and content migration from K2 to Joomla core. The project spanned two years and the version of Joomla that was in place at the beginning of the project had become redundant and a security risk.
Fortunately St Christopher's senior management completely understood & accepted the need to revise the scope to accommodate this migration and core update. We have now delivered a completely secure and up to date responsive website that truly tells the story of this delightful and inclusive south coast school whilst maintaining clear paths to conversion for prospective parents, staff & pupils alike.
A new website for the Old Brightonians - the Alumni of the Brighton College
The brief was essentially very simple: maintain current functionality and content and migrate to the latest version of Joomla and a new fully responsive template.
We've been building and maintaining sites for Brighton College's Alumni since 1998. The last few iterations have all been on the wonderful Open Source Joomla platform and this latest version is no exception.
The brief was essentially very simple: maintain current functionality and content and migrate to the latest version of Joomla and a new fully responsive template - a process we're well used to and which normally runs smoothly and without too many issues.
The new site dovetails with their new Alumni database site (on Graduway) and neatly embeds their event booking system, meaning that the Joomla CMS isn't doing too much "heavy lifting" beyond the delivery of what has become a vast and varied body of tagged content across many categories. The challenge on sites like this is ensuring that "busy" doesn't become "cluttered" and I think with this client we've always achieved that, even going so far as to frequently demo the work to prospective and existing clients as a good example of content delivery.
The site - and its many versions over the years - also serves as a great indictment of this wonderful CMS; in many ways Joomla is far less configurable and versatile than Drupal, but when budget, time and client familiarity dictate it remains a popular and well proven weapon in our arsenal.
Royal Albert Hall Kiosk App
The joint efforts of The Royal Albert hall & 3B Digital to make the public spaces at the venue more interactive, informative and dynamic continue unabated with the design & implementation of a wonderful new Kiosk Interface of the live “What’s On” data.
The joint efforts of The Royal Albert hall & 3B Digital to make the public spaces at the venue more interactive, informative and dynamic continue unabated with the design & implementation of a wonderful new Kiosk Interface of the live “What’s On” data.
The challenge was to take feeds from the existing website’s data, filter and style to present on a “rolling” vertical screen within the Box Office area at the Hall.
The pages are shown on a simple Chromebit plugged into the big screen showing the webpage built with AngularJS, a JSON feed from their website and the excellent Kiosk Chrome App.
We know the result has been well received because while Jack was on-site supervising the installation he was surrounded by fascinated by Hall visitors eager to see what’s coming up!
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!
Royal Albert Hall’s “Peter Blake app”
Back in May we were really delighted to be approached by the Royal Albert Hall (RAH) in relation to a wall mural they’d commissioned from Peter Blake. The mural featured over 400 of the most famous artists to have appeared at the historic venue over the years.
Back in May 2014 we were really delighted to be approached by the Royal Albert Hall in relation to a wall mural they’d commissioned from Peter Blake. The mural featured over 400 of the most famous artists to have appeared at the historic venue over the years.
The Hall provided a perfectly open brief that allowed us to bring both creative and practical disciplines suitably early in the project lifecycle. It’s exactly this level of involvement with clients that allows 3B to shine; we really appreciate it when clients trust us to help them take a “whacky” half-formed idea and mould it, with them, into a solid, deliverable tool that often serves a purpose greater than its original brief.
Essentially, our brief was to deliver an online interface that would work on mobile, kiosk and desktop. The site would be fully responsive and manageable by Hall staff constantly updating and amending the content held on each artist who is featured in the mural.
We had quite a challenging timeline on this project and we really threw ourselves at it, design through to launch, and it’s now delivered through two static kiosks in the Café Bar at the Door 12 entrance of the Royal Albert Hall as well as on mobile devices and computers via http://appearing.royalalberthall.com/.
We’re really delighted with this project; working closely with a terrific client that had realistic expectations and a truly creative flair we were able to produce an essentially simple and elegant interactive interface that will serve as a platform for “gamification" and enhancements going forward.
