Website Design Kent Technical Comments:-
Your website needs to communicate Brand and continue to strengthen through an evolving Online Identity.
Navigation needs to be intuitive for the user as well as ‘expandable’ for the client. The template should accommodate rapid business growth and be able to respond quickly to new ideas.
The site should be written in an industry standard programming language (PHP 5 and above).
The site should be written to the latest web standards for CSS and XHTML.
The site should comply to a minimum of AA standards for Accessibility. This is soon to become a legal requirement.
The site should render correctly across all popular browsers and cater for the latest two versions of each.
The site should display suitably on hand-held devices such as Palm and Mobile.
The site should be visually appealing but at the same time ‘optimised’ for a streamline and fast loading site.
Importance of Home Page:
This should provide an overview of the site’s content at a glance. The user should become familiar quickly with the tools and ’site furniture’.
Links should be obvious.
Relevant Key words and Key word phrases should be present on this page so that search engines may index the page.
The page should make use of Social Media and ear-marked with the universally recognised icons.
The page should make use of all the ‘dynamic’ content available through the site. This way the page will inherit the latest news, events and other ‘fresh’
information.
This will allow the site to ‘frequently change’ and cause deeper indexing from search engines. In turn this will increase the exposure of your website on the Internet for your desirable Key words and phrases.
The same strategy should be applied throughout the site although some content may need slightly different treatment to comply with the above.
Chameleon Boutique
Chameleon Boutique is primarily a ladies boutique offering products from classy lingerie to hair and beauty accessories.
Creative Venom were invited to provide a design that communicated elegance and sophistication, within a stylised yet intuitive website.
We provided the site’s engine too. The site demanded an E-commerce facility to provide efficient admin as well as flexible output.
Our E-commerce product is designed to facilitate all the necessary ingredients to create a successful website, both in terms of user-experience, ease of administration and maintenance, as well as being highly susceptible to Google and other major search engines.
Much of the first-phase SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is achieved through our product alone. Title tags, meta tags and descriptions and image captions are expressed at product level. Providing the website administrator fuels the fire by adding content on a regular basis the website will steadily increase it’s PR (Page Rank) with Google and will consequently reach a wider and more targeted audience of potential customers.
Chameleon Boutique is only in it’s infancy and is already daily sales. Google has already indexed close to 200 pages of content.
Cumberland Building Society
Creative Venom won a lengthy tender process to provide a website and management system for Cumberland Building Society, Cumberland Business Banking and Cumberland Financial Planning.
Our task was to provide a design that offered rigidity in terms of consistent and perpetual brand communication, but with enough flexibility built in to accommodate varying content and rich media.
All three websites are driven from the same powerful CMS (Content Management System) a user-friendly and modular administration system for the up-keep and general house keeping of content. The solution had to provide ‘room for growth’ both horizontally and vertically.
Again the client has benefited from a head-start on SEO, largely due to the way the URL or ’slug’ is written. Google will therefore make better sense of these and rank the Cumberland higher in it’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
We have been working for the Cumberland for three years and continue to develop the site under contract as well as going the extra mile by constantly suggesting new and innovative ways of taking the website forward both in terms of user-experience as well as the technology it is built upon. We are currently assisting the Building Society with their Intranet (Internal Internet), which provisions have been made to deploy at the end of 2010.
Hazlitt Arts Centre
Creative were awarded a 5 year contract to take their website to the next level by improving it’s infrastructure and visual appeal. This is part of strategic steps to raise local profile and boost ticket sales.
The website links in with a ticket ‘buying’ system and syndicates data both ways. All performance sales are facilitated through the website. We have improved the visibility of performances by improving the layout and categorisation of productions. We have began to raise the profile of the theatre by integrating a ‘follow me on Twitter’ button in a so far successful attempt to build a social media community.
We are about to implement a CMS to assist them with the day-to-day housekeeping of site content. This will provide the client with the ability to edit text, manage links and interchange images.
We are also responsible for the visual identity of their E-Newsletters. These are sent out to a database of over four thousand email addresses (collected through the website) and deliver a condensed snapshot of the months ahead for the Theatre. The newsletter is designed to display correctly in a variety of popular email clients and has some refreshing features such as ’send to friend’ and ‘follow us on Twitter’.
Our relationship with the theatre has grown tremendously and we are currently looking at design solutions for the Youth Theatre section of the website. This is set to be more engaging by offering video and image galleries, as well as greater integration with YouTube and Face Book.
Acid Trading
ACID, Anti Copying In Design, is committed to fighting design theft. Creative Venom were invited to provide a site design for their E-commerce product, providing customers with all the resources they need to ensure their designs and products are fully protected from concept to market place.
Our task was to get the website ranking higher on Google’s SERPs and improve the simplicity of the user’s shopping experience by minimising the number of click and improving the ’signposts’ to all the useful information and repositories. The products needed to categorise
Product Categorise ACID Membership, Generic Agreements, Deterrent Products, Safe Pitch Kit Insurance and Membership Renewals.
The Search feature was also an important feature to get right. The coverage of search terms needed to be as wide as possible to provide useful and plentiful search results.
Creative Venom are continuing to develop various aspects of the website; both from a user and back-end, analytical view point. We are currently looking at methods to track the success and validity of traffic from website entry to checkout exit with the assistance of Google Analytics.
Bagel Factory
We provided Bagel Factory with a website template driven by CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), to produce a site that would be easily accessed, and therefore indexed by search engines.
Branding was a big part; ensuring consistency throughout pages. The site also offers a scrollable gallery of various menus as downloadable PDF’s.
Another large part of the website was the Store Locator. This was achieved by linking in with Google’s API (Application Interface) for maps. We were then able to pin-point the exact location from a longitude and latitude value.
The website is administered by the client through a cut-down CMS, providing them with a quick handle on simple text and image changes.
Rutland Live
This project is still in development mode. It offers ticket buying for events and shows, map venue-locators. The logo was designed along with the visual identity for the pages. The navigation was a large part of the planning process along with the Event Planner and News.
Press Release – Thursday, January 7, 2010 – Kent Design Team Work to a Beat
Creative Venom can produce slick and state-of-the-art motion graphics for video post-production and overlays. Using After Effects, Flame, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier to achieve high-end and eye-catching video. 3D animation can be achieved at the Kent studio as well as 3D modeling and video production.
Creative Venom – Website design & development Kent will be keeping you updated with the latest music video’s viewed at the Creative Venom studio.Check out all our other references to Music on our Music & Video page. Overtime Creative Venom will be adding to their bespoke play-list and growing it as the latest videos emerge from the artists and production companies. Enjoy! You can also catch us on Twitter…
creativevenom TV on MUZU.
Press Release – Wednesday, January 6, 2010 – Website Design & Development Kent
Creative Venom – Website design & development Kent have ample experience of working with WordPress and Joomla CMS. In fact our own website; http://www.creativevenom is actively being developed in WordPress. Another example can be seen here; http://www.joepubclick.co.uk – a free advertising platform for local businesses. Our preferred programming language is PHP so we are familiar with the day to day manipulation and customisation of stylesheets and templates. Our websites are hosted on a ‘LAMP’ setup – so Linux boxes are familiar territory. We are currently looking at providing development solutions for http://www.hazlittartscentre.co.uk (CMS system is gradually being introduced).
Although other ‘open source’ systems are familiar to us, we would highly recommend our own in-house CMS solution. We have developed this over the last three years and the core functionality (News, Blogs, Events, Calendars, Banner Management, Media Managements, Image Control, General Editing) is extremely robust and has been tested among the latest browsers across PC and Macintosh platforms. All systems will permit a minimum of ‘AA’ Accessibility standards. Our system can be seen working to it’s fullest at http://www.cumberland.co.uk. The Business, Estate Agent and Financial Planning websites found among the navigation are also driven from the same system using one central admin environment for ease of use.
Our system is ‘modular’ based and can therefore be added to. This we have found is attractive to larger organisations that have specific requirements in terms of functionality. http://www.cumberlandestateagents.co.uk saw us develop a bespoke module that allowed them to maintain all their branch information including maps from the admin panel. Another example was a module developed to create an ‘approval process’. This made sure that articles and other pieces of content were approved as necessary before being published.
Content can be fully automated. Purge dates can be set, along with ‘pending’ and ‘revisions’. This ensures content undergoes to correct measure of scrutiny before being published. Revisions allow previous versions of content to be rolled back to and restored, pending means that content can be queued and approved well in advance. The system by its very nature is efficient and after some use – very intuitive.
Our websites begin their life on a demo server. This means they can be tested thoroughly across all aspects before anything is made publicly accessible on the Net. They are built using a ‘base’ path to allow the ‘going live’ process’ to be as smooth and trouble-free as possible.
We deliver our work in phases and gain feedback at each stage. This allows us to implement desired changes from the client before progressing the project. Again Cumberland was built using this approach and was efficiently and effectively achieved within the several months scheduled for its development.
Press Release – Thursday, August 28, 2008
http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/whitstable/Creative-Venom-Profilearticle-294972-details/article.html
A MUTUAL love of music sowed the seeds for a very modern business success story in Whitstable. Sean Gambrill and James Palmer-Jones first met as teenagers on a night out clubbing in the Medway Towns.
Before the last record had played, a friendship had been forged which has grown into a work partnership that continues to flourish.
They jointly own graphic design firm Creative Venom in Cromwell Road, Whitstable Kent – doing anything from devloping websites for companies, to 3D modeling and creating promotional advertising campaigns.
Though they employ a staff of six, the origins of the business go back to James’s back bedroom in his High Street apartment.
“I first met James when we were about 19 and were going out to The Zone nightclub in Gillingham,” said Sean, 31.
“We shared a love of hip hop and R ‘n’ B music and on the car ride with a mutual pal – who introduced us – we got talking about what we did for work. I was at college studying art design and James was studying and so we got chatting about how we were both involved with design. And we’ve been friends ever since”.
“Our careers took different routes but we both wanted to start our own business when we could. I was doing some freelance work and James had a full-time job, so in the evenings we’d get together in a room at my home and come up with some ideas”.
‘We’d get bits and pieces of work and it was obvious we were on to something. So we both went for it 100 per cent – James gave up his job – and five years last March we started Creative Venom“.
“Our first job was for a local developer and that gave us the springboard. Currently we’re working on the Hampton Heights development in Herne Bay, but our work can take us all over the world – We have customers in Barbados and Carlisle“.
When you meet Sean and James, you can tell they are close as friends.
The last time James got emotional was at Sean’s wedding in August last year. He said: “It was a great occasion and I was really proud to be a best man. “It was at the Museum of Kent life in Maidstone which was a fantastic venue. “I had to organise the stag-do which was really fun. “We went clay pigeon shooting and Sean was terrible at it. “I as worried that he wasn’t enjoying himself but in the last round he pulled-it-out-of the-bag and managed to hit nine out of 10 clays. “We then went on a four day trip to Magalluf in Majorca which was a brilliant way to see Sean off.”
Sean realised early on what he wanted to do with his life and he has worked hard to achieve his goals. He said: “I went to St Alphege Primary School and then the Endowed. “Once I finished my GCSE’s and A-levels at the Nottidge and I went to Art College in Rochester and that’s where I realised that I wanted to go straight into the working world. “I managed to get a job designing graphics for computer arcade games which was a good platform to learn. “We did a lot of work for software giants Sega and then I moved to a design agency in Canterbury. “There was a lot of freelance work and that’s where I started working with James”.
James continued: “I come from a graphic design and website design background after completing a degree in the subject at Coventry University. Sean and I started designing websites and we soon realised that we could make a business out of what we were creating in our bedrooms”.
Sean said: “Our clients include property companies, shops and popular brands but we also work with local businesses which is great for the area as Whitstable has improved dramatically since I was a boy”.
Starting a business and making it work can be very time consuming but these plucky chaps roll with the tide.
Contact Creative Venom – Kent based Design to discuss your next project…
Telephone: +44 (0) 1227 265 641
Mobile: +44 (0) 791 907 3881
Mobile: +44 (0) 776 023 5520
166 D Cromwell Road, Whitstable Kent CT5 1NA
