SmarterBlog

Coleman Bradshaw Site is Live!

March 10th, 2008 by johnap

It is with great pleasure that we announce the birth of our new piece of work onto the www…

Coleman Bradshaw, a firm of Accountants with offices in Matlock and Sutton-in-Ashfield commissioned us to design and build a site for them. They didn’t have one at the time, and thought it was about time - as they were expanding their business and wanted to improve their overall profile locally.

So here it is :

http://www.colemanbradshaw.co.uk/

Being a relatively small firm, they needed a straightforward way of adding “news” content from time to time, as well as providing useful content and links. We achieved this by building a site that combined two main elements:

• A simple well designed site (built on the Django Python framework) that had plenty of relevant content and features such as an enquiry form, interactive location maps for the offices, regularly updated feeds of useful accountancy articles and a page of useful resources (links) on the web.
• A blog (running on Wordpress with custom templates) that is easy for them to update and add fresh content to the site on a regular basis, but also seamlessly integrates with the rest of the site.

We managed the project with the help of Basecamp - an excellent no-nonsense web based application that really helps with communication and organisation on a project like this. Also, we had the design talents of a highly experienced designer, who was able to come up with a clean, unfussy design that Coleman Bradshaw were very happy with, and fitted in well with their existing coporate style. In addition to the purely visual aspects of the design, the code (HTML and CSS) that our designer delivered to us, made it easy for us to develop a site that scores well in terms of performance, standards compliance and usability.

We learnt a few things along the way :

• Django and Wordpress are a great combination for developing such a site
• Make sure if you need to do any outdoor photography, you don’t do it at the end of a cold day half way up one of the steepest hills in Matlock!
• Keep checking in your code while working to avoid version mismatches - we use Subversion with TortoiseSVN which is great.
• Keep versions of software on your development and live/testing environments in sync - this caused some problems for us with changes in the Django framework.
• Make sure you keep your client up to date with progress - even if you’ve not done much since you last told them.

Coleman Bradshaw were a pleasure to work with and kept up well with their side of the work - i.e. writing good quality content. Often this is an area where projects can get tricky, as the client is often very busy with the normal day-to-day workings of a business - especially if they are a small outfit.

It sounds like they’re very pleased with what we’ve developed for them too, but you don’t have to take our word for it - read their post here.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 7:22 pm and is filed under our work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.