We are a small web production company primarily providing London and regional media agencies with outsourced web services for their clients. We don't like the word boutique.

We very, very rarely have to chase work as so much of what we do is repeat business through a relatively small number of agencies. However the breath of work we undertake is huge, from cartoon animation in flash through to complex business solutions in Sharepoint (and everything inbetween) This reflects the diversity of clients that our agency partners look after.

Please have a look at a selection of the projects we have recently undertaken and do feel free to contact us for some friendly advice on your next online job.

Paramount Pictures Movie Banners

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

We must now be on our 8th or 9th movie campaign for Paramount. We typically produce a range of flash banners to support the release of a movie online. Each campaign is always delivered on extremely tight timescales to fit in with the film release. The goal posts are often moved mid campaign.

We remember well last Christmas when Up In The Air with George Clooney forced us to cancel our festive holidays completely. The film did go on to be nominated for many Oscars and Baftas so in the end we didn't mind. One of those jobs where you have to be very organised as the client takes no prisoners.

Costcutter Supermarket Website

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

We have a custom content management system that we have developed over the years and which tends to support most of the larger sites we produce. Costcutter's main public facing site is perhaps the most recent to use the system. The beauty of building a content management system yourself is that you can customise it to suit the job if necessary. Not something you can do easily with off the shelf systems like Joomla.

So for the Costcutter site we built a lot of custom modules to handle the large number of campaigns, offers and competitions that they run. All this content also has to be set up in advance to go live automatically on timers. The site regularly exceeds 50,000 visitors per week and is likely to be extended further at some point with additional functionality that we had better not mention here.

Co-operative Christmas Card Animation

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

We often think of this job as Dig Red's finest moment. It is one thing to be experts in Flash, but it is quite another to turn static Christmas card scenes into living, breathing stories capable of conveying the ethos of the various parts of the Co-operative. With a quick purchase of 'The Animator's Survival Kit' by Richard Williams we completed six animations scenes to the client's delight at half the cost of the specialist studio in Manchester which had previously quoted well over their budget. We are especially proud of the snow!

OralB Style Smile

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

You know at school when you did matrices in maths and thought 'when am I ever going to have to use these?!' We used a load of matrix transformations in this job for OralB. The idea is that you upload an image of yourself, rotate and scale it to line up with the template and add some lips and teeth. The teeth are in various states of decay giving the OralB video dentist an opportunity to tell you about oral hygiene. Once you have matched the set of teeth to your head you can upload or save the image. A great job requiring loads of maths to make it go.

Co-operative PR Tracker

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

This site is used by one of our agency clients to track the PR work that they do for the Coop, for example recording press releases or TV slots generated by the PR department. The site has to generate sleek reports which are accessible by the Coop themselves. We integrated with a third party reporting tool to generate printable reports including lots of graphical goodies like charts and graphs.

The backend of the system had to be as close to entering data into Excel as possible, as this was the way the PR department previously entered data when the system ran purely off spreadsheets. We built a nice grid system with autocomplete fields based upon previous data entered to make them feel at home.

Survey Monkey Clone

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

Survey Monkey is the most popular online surveying tool. However, what happens when you do not want them to hold extremely sensitive financial information on their web servers? One of our regular clients was in such a situation so we built a clone of Survey Monkey with all the same functionality but hosted ourselves. Actually quite an interesting job in terms of system design and architecture. Although the administration area of the site is not as slick as Survey Monkey (no real requirement or budget for it to be) the surveys generated are pretty much identical.

The tool was also integrated with the online emailer service Campaign Monitor to allow easy setup of a personalised email invitation to participate in the survey.

Deer Shed Festival

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

An interesting job for a new music festival in North Yorkshire. We got involved very early on in the conception of this festival which sold out in it's first year. We built a fairly simple web site but one that was extremely easy to use and which would present the festival's programme in the best possible light. It remains capable of very naturally handling any content you can imagine throwing at it.

For 2011 we have extended the site by building an electronic ticketing system which uses a SagePay payment gateway and also integrated this with our own staff and volunteer scheduling application. The festival estimate this extra functionality will save them £10,000 per year in ticketing costs and staff administration.

World Entrepreneurs Society

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

Another site based upon our content management system (CMS) but with private membership areas. The World Entrepreneur Society or WES for short , brief was to create a site to support their annual entrepreneur summits and what they call knowledge leadership. A site that really benefits from a good CMS with new articles and content constantly being authored and published.

The site includes a third party forum application with integrated authorisation, basically a single login for both sites.We have an ongoing relationship with WES that will see us building upon there web platforms in the near future.

Element Jewellery

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

This was the first job we took on in challenging circumstances and a job that came with obvious pitfalls. We took over the job after the previous developer had suffered a nervous breakdown whilst working on it, never a good sign! When we took over the site was missing the checkout plus payment integration but also the essential product import service from the main electronic point of sale (EPOS) system. We probably under quoted for the initial work with Element and as a consequence were not able to offer ongoing support for the site at a cost the client would of liked.

Although support of the system is now outsourced to India we are still very proud to of completed the work as promised even when the going was tough.

Lumiere - Sony Ireland

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

An artist site through Sony Ireland. Lumiere are an Irish duo who required a pretty standard site for musicians. Video, audio, shows, all the usual band stuff. A site is usually only is good as it's imagery and in the case of Lumiere we have some nice photo shoots to work with. A subtle use of Flash on this site and even an excursion into After Effects for the site loader animation.

Thwaites - Worth Walking For

Posted by: Oliver Jones 02/11/2010

A competition microsite based upon the life of Alfred Wainwright, a famous walker of the lake district and writer of many books - basically Thwaites named a beer after him. The copy on the site was fed through a backend CMS system to allow easy content changes by the client.