The design combines form and function beautifully.

This year we donated some of our time and energy to Crosby, Liverpool’s Plaza Cinema.  In part they were selected because we’d just missed out on the running to redevelop the FACT website after having made the shortlist.  We had heads full of great ideas for the presentation of cinematic information and schedules and we fancied implementing them.  Rob, the designer and developer of this site, had just moved into a new house around the corner from the Plaza Cinema and couldn’t help noticing that their site could benefit from our skills.  An idea was born, some calls were made, and a plan fell into place.

Services Provided

• Full Web Design
• Development of sophisticated WordPress theme
• Extension of Events Plugin to handle complex cinema schedules
• Development of TheMovieDb.org API plugin to improve workflow
• Custom taxonomies
• Hosting
• User training
• Ongoing user support
• Links to newsletter subscription systems
• Ongoing content management support

Site Design

A cinema website design is a tricky thing to get just right – after all, you need to be able to easily present complex scheduling information (what’s on, what’s coming soon, etc) whilst at the same time allowing the films to sell themselves.  We wanted to create a cinematic experience within the browser quite unlike the surprisingly poor visual experience of most cinema websites.

The design language within interconnect/it is very much based upon typographic systems following mathematical structures.  There’s not only a grid of columns, as is common on websites, but a carefully structured typographic scale allowing for the creation of vertical rhythm.

With the strong typographic there is little need for graphical frippery and instead you can allow the text and movie images to really stand out.  On the movie pages we use large backdrop images, pulled in automatically from the TheMovieDb.org, to create a visually bold statement with very little effort from the site administrators.

The simplified small screen view.

On top of this there is a dynamic feel to the site where hovering over film names changes the backdrops, and clicking them has the feeling of dimming the lights while the film trailer is pulled in from YouTube.  The feeling of being at the cinema is reproduced in these actions.

Responsive Design

Not only is the site visually powerful on a large screen or laptop, it changes itself should you have a small screen such as a telephone or tablet.  This responsive design allows for a simplified presentation whilst retaining all the important information.

Time-Saving Workflow

One key element we focus on at interconnect/it is that visual design is nothing without a good workflow for the people who assemble the site.  A CMS should never slow down or stress the user or visitor, and we look at what takes up their time and what we can do to save it.  In this site’s case, the ability to automatically pull in movie descriptions, images and taxonomies such as actors and directors means that a lot of time is saved in creating the site’s content.  It used to take about an hour to create a film listing whereas it now takes around five to ten minutes to not only list the film, but allow visitors to view trailers and see the key people involved.

This video shows how the workflow comes together:

Visit the Plaza Cinema website and see for yourself why it’s a step forward in cinema website design.

Gallery

The site serves a community of over 14,000 decision makers.

That's a very long screenshot, isn't it? But Digital TV Europe has a lot of news to get out there.

Digital TV Europe needed a stronger online presence along with a simpler way of managing content such that it could help retain users.

Services Provided

• Design feedback
• Design detail completion
• Development of sophisticated WordPress Theme
• Events display from Magento feeds
• Sections management
• Tools to handle large numbers of advertising spots
• Custom taxonomies
• Custom post types
• Installation
• Ongoing user and technical support

Site Build

The site’s visuals and structure was designed by the Digital TV Europe team, and interpreted by interconnect/it into a WordPress theme and suite of functionality designed to provide simple usability.

Principle requirements included dramatically improved SEO, faster publishing, ability to handle a range of content types, tools to enable the placing of advertising in a wide range of spots.

Three Months Later

The site has been running without a single ticket raised since August 2011, and has attracted a growing readership. They’ve been kind enough to release their traffic statistics to us and you can read more about the project’s success in our case study of the site’s traffic growth.

Gallery

The images in this gallery reveal some of the functional elements of the site, but are in no way a complete representation, nor do they show the significant back-end tools that have been developed.

Services Provided

There's a lot of functionality here, but it's made readily available.

• Design feedback
• Design detail completion
• Development of sophisticated WordPress Theme
• Development of Events plugin
• Custom taxonomies
• Hosting
• User training
• Ongoing user support
• Links to newsletter subscription systems
• Ongoing content management support

Site Build

The overall site design was built by the team at Capita, while we were responsible for some finishing touches along with the final build and back-end design where appropriate. We created an accessible, easy to use site which would perform well in search engines.

The biggest challenge, however, was the event management. Repeating, frequent events that needed to be categorised according to location, accessibility, price, type and so on. It’s always difficult to know what the best options for categorising things like this will be, but Greenwich had researched and tested a number of ideas and came to us with their preferred structure that allows visitors to quickly find their preferred events.

Three Months in

The site has been running successfully since May 2011, and has attracted a growing readership. Not only that, but the newsletter subscription has been a huge success and means that thousands of newsletters are now regularly sent out to residents and health professionals. The site is frequently updated, and support overhead is minimal. Overall, a huge success and interconnect/it is now listed as a preferred supplier of web services to the Greenwich PCT – that’s always nice to see!

Visit the Greenwich Healthy Living Service website and see for yourself why it’s doing so well.

So here’s the first – launched in mid-Spring 2011, the new corporate Informa Telecoms & Media was built by us over winter. It’s our most sophisticated ever WordPress implementation, offering a huge range of functionality that allows the marketing team at the company to quickly and easily show off the wide range of products and services on offer.

Lots going on here. And you see that Digital TV Europe announcement they're highlighting? We built that too.

• Adds WordPress Sections – a new tool by us
• Dramatic extension of the WP widgets system
• Powerful aggregation tools
• Easy to create alternative sites for other brands
• Large range of banner and image options
• Social integration
• WordPress Multisites
• Mega menus
• Lots of other clever stuff we can’t tell you about!

The front-end design was supplied to us by Informa’s internal design team. We then took this, added WordPress specific design elements, and developed the workflow, plugin suite and theme that now allows Informa Telecoms & Media to quickly promote events and new product ranges throughout their website.

A large part of the job centred around a blogging platform for Informa’s analysts, with author specific taxonomies allowing for a more sophisticated way of allowing visitors to drill down into information. As a consequence, the Analysts Blogs element of the site adds a range of features that isn’t commonly seen in WordPress based blogs.

Events Promotion

Informa Telecoms & Media run a huge range of events. Their website previously failed to drive traffic to events and, where it did, failed to capture the interest of visitors. Consequently, we developed functionality to allow for the quick and easy aggregation of events and the automatic creation of .ics files allowing visitors to add events to their diaries.

The site is almost too big to describe fully, so why not just go and take a look?

Consequently, they asked us, as one of their long-term suppliers, to supply to them with a WordPress a theme which followed their designer’s style and yet came with easy work-flow to allow them to easily build multiple sites with different branding and content but otherwise similar structures.

The first site using the platform.

• WordPress Multisites based.
• Fully content managed (no hardcoding*).
• Widget powered home page.
• Colour controls for branding control.
• Flexible header controls.
• Many other enhancements.

The front-end design was supplied to us by Informa’s internal design team. We then took this, the requirements, and developed the workflow, plugin suite and theme that now allows the firm to quickly and efficiently create marketing sites for a wide range of products. At launch the platform runs the IFW Advertising Marketing site.

One of the key things that interconnect/it prides itself on is to always deliver flexible, powerful WordPress code with an eye on future requirements. This platform was no exception, and will allow the marketing team to maintain online marketing sites quickly and cheaply for their various publications.

Colour Coding

Colour wheels allow easy colour setting, with RGB override available.

One important thing in branding, is colour coding. Quickly the client can change the look and feel of the site using the colour wheel controls provided in the theme’s back-end.

WordPress Multi-Sites Compatibility

You’d be amazed how few plugins fully support WordPress’s multisites functionality. Everything we write at interconnect/it is fully standards compliant and, consequently, works well in a multisite environment.

One Button Site Copies

You’ve created one site, you often wish to build another with a similar structure, content and settings. Rather than rebuilding, we use a plugin developed with Mike Little, which allows for the very quick and simple reproduction of WordPress sites.

Rich Text Widget means editing ease.

Rich Text Widgets

If you’ve ever tried using the standard text widgets available you’ll know that they’re limited in power. Our rich text widget allows for easy editing of rich content in a sidebar location without needing to have a working knowledge of HTML. Not only that, but the widget fully renders shortcodes, galleries and videos, meaning that you can create far more sophisticated content in places you’d never expect.

Multiple Headers

Relatively simple code in this case – we use the Featured Image functionality against pages to show different headers as appropriate.

Other Enhancements

Most of the other enhancements were able to be delivered using off-the-shelf WordPress plugins for form management, domain management and SEO functionality.

* Hard coding is a short cut taken by many developers that allows them to deliver quickly at a cost of future flexibility and ease of use. We don’t like hard coding here – it makes our work a little more expensive, but it makes our code easier to live with and reduces support costs dramatically.

The My Telegraph project needed various plugins and front-end development.

Following our work with The Telegraph Blogs supplying code, plugins and consultancy we were asked to be involved in the My Telegraph project for which we supplied a number of staff to work on time and materials basis.

Additional to that, we were tasked with building the blog theme for the project along with various back-end tools that allowed a user to customise the look of their blog whilst still maintaining a consistent look and feel across the site.  Primarily, it was important that users had a consistent experience, the tools were very easy to use, and that the theme minimised the load on what would be a very busy web server.

A My Telegraph User Blog

Key Criteria

There were a number of things that were important in this build:

1. Output must be pixel perfect according to the designs and trading guidelines provided
2. The user could control a number of colours on the page, including their personal header image
3. Had to work perfectly in a BuddyPress environment
4. Must support a large range of browsers correctly
5. Reliability is critical – projects which are both free at the point of delivery and with a lot of users cannot afford a significant number of support requests
6. The back-end options panel must be simple to use.

The theme is technically fairly straightforward with no complex options.  However, the options page had to be simple, flexible, and enjoyable to use.

Results

My Telegraph's Banner Picker

The result was a blogging theme that users could (and generally did) tweak to suit their own image and desires.  The header was auto-cropped, for simplicity, and performance was quick and simple.

We also carried out work for the BuddyPress theme built by the in-house Telegraph Media team – the Groups banner function, colour picker, IE7 compatibility fixes and numerous other small tweaks.

Over the past two years we have provided a wide range of other WordPress and BuddyPress services to The Telegraph and look forward to working increasingly closely on larger and more diverse projects in the future.

Informa needed a reliable and effective webinars delivery platform

This is probably the most complex of WordPress projects we’ve ever delivered. It’s also a fine example of how WordPress has evolved as a content management system. Although it’s possible to create custom taxonomies and post types for some time, it’s only recently that it’s become a relatively easy process. As a consequence the building of a complex site such as this has now become cost-effective within WordPress and you no longer need to use an expensive proprietary CMS to delivery such sophistication. There’s still a lot of coding and development, of course, but it’s a two month job rather than one which would take six months and require a team of developers.

A Complex Site, Simply Delivered

We were asked by Informa PLC to provide a webinars delivery platform that had a wide range of functions enabling them to sell to telecoms industry clients the facility to create webinars targetted at Telecoms.com’s extensive readership and mailing lists.  Consequently the system needed a wide range of functionality so that the value of delivered webinars for clients would be maximised.

The system also needed to be relatively easy to use, cost-effective, and delivered to a tight timescale.

Key Functionality

1. Contextual Widgets, controlled from with the page editor
2. Registration tier
3. OpenAuth integration
4. Data gathering tools
5. E-mail handling to users subscribed to a webinar
6. Video handling
7. Amazon CloudFront content delivery
8. High efficiency code allowing server to deliver several hundred pages in a one second timeframe
9. Parent theme, allowing CSS based child themes to be quickly developed for other Informa Webinars businesses
10. Advertising handling (delivered from OpenX server)
11. Viewer statistics reporting
12. Live discussion engine based on WordPress comments

Threaded, Ajax based live discussion can be enabled and disabled as required

While the system presented a number of challenges from a development perspective, it has proven to be extremely reliable in usage and has consistently delivered webinars with low support costs since delivery – this is typical for interconnect/it where our support business is a tiny fraction of our development business.

Design

The design was supplied by Informa’s own internal design team and in itself presented a number of challenges that had to be implemented with care in order to maintain performance.  Shadows, for example, are best rendered by the browser.  However, many older browsers do not render shadows correctly.  To deal with this, interconnect/it increasingly delivers code that adheres to the principle of progressive enhancement.  In other words, certain elements simply aren’t rendered in an older browser if there is no significant loss in site aesthetics.  Then, as the user’s browser capabilities increase according to version, the additional styling elements are delivered.  This helps to make a site more efficient, and rewards users of newer browsers with a subtly enhanced aesthetic.

Platform

The site is hosted on a WordPress Multisites install along with other Informa Telecoms & Media websites.  This allows the owners to quickly create new sites as required.

Backend Gallery

There are a number of sophisticated back-end controls.  The screenshots gallery below illustrates how just a few of these were implemented – the range of controls is far larger than shown.

Custom Post Type Extends WP Functionality

Use of WordPress's Custom Taxonomy features allows for fine grained control over the display of content

When creating a webinar, you have a huge range of options and power to give fine-grained control over the content

The login system supports the use of OpenAuth providers such as Google and Facebook

Danbar Drilling needed a high quality website to help cement their market-leading position

Danbar Drilling required a website that would put them above their rivals – they wanted a site that was better designed, had excellent browser compatibility, and was easy for them to work with.
We delivered a WordPress based solution designed to have a striking front page with key product points, with a news section becoming visible to those surfing more deeply into the site.

The visual look and feel of the site was designed in-house, using images supplied by Danbar Drilling, and the structure was proposed following several meetings with the Danbar management team.  The site uses a banded design, allowing brief introductory copy, along with a suitable representative image, to show in the top band, with more detail below.

Since implementing the site, Danbar Drilling have recorded a number of interesting enquiries along with potential recruits submitting CVs using the job submission form.  This is helping to streamline their processes.  The site is still very new and it will be interesting to see how it develops over the coming months.

Visit the Danbar Drilling site.

Screenshots

Danbar Home Page

Danbar Job Application Form

Politics & The City is a WordPress MU based site with productivity tools added

For a change, a site we didn’t design. Instead we were supplied mock-ups and a basic design brief from the Liverpool design agency Black & Ginger, which we then turned into a living, breathing, news website using our WordPress skills to help make a dynamic site easy to manage even for relatively untrained staff.

Key problems solved in the creation of Politics & The City can easily be listed:

• Performance – the site will be expected to receive large spikes in traffic
• Ease of expansion
• Ease of use and content management
• High standards of presentation
• Ease of control over the site’s features
• Highly demanding implementation schedule (three weeks!)
• Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 331 5140 (+44 151 331 5140 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

Visit the Politics & The City site.

Screen Shots:

Please note that certain flash elements haven’t been correctly rendered by our screen shot software – to see everything in action, visit Politics & The City although it’s worth noting that as at July 2009 the site has been dramatically cut back to a single blog.

Politics & The City Home Page

Inside one of the many Politics & The City Blogs

Telecoms.com is an example of using WordPress as an entire website news platform.

When we were approached by Informa Telecoms & Media, part of the FTSE 250 listed Informa corporation with an expression of interest in using WordPress for their entire site, we weren’t sure what to expect.  A lot of companies ask us about using the platform for blogging, but although we’d done the groundwork for using WordPress as a news platform interest was still quite low until late 2008.

We were excited to see that a major news and information group was taking an interest in WordPress, having successfully used it as a blogging platform.  It seems that blogging has been a great way for WordPress to enter companies, and the system has evolved full CMS capabilities in time for these same companies to be able to consider implementing WordPress site-wide.

Informa are one of the first companies in the UK to make a full move into using WordPress.  To help them do this we developed a range of solutions for their site, going beyond their expectations and delivering a functionally rich WordPress solution that within two months has already increased page views and visitor numbers by between 30% and 50%. In particular we addressed certain workflow and flexibility requirements that pushed WordPress way beyond its original blogging roots and deep into the CMS capabilities it now has.

Everything that’s been built does exactly what we asked for, and in some cases goes beyond. The whole set up is very versatile and all works in a logical manner. I feel comfortable explaining the workings of the site to other users now. And the best thing is that I don’t have to involve another team and put maintenance requests in if it’s something I can do myself, making life much easier.

James Middleton, Managing Editor of Telecoms.com

Visit the Telecoms.com site or read the Telecoms.com case study

Home Page New & Old:

Telecoms.com Home Page

Telecoms.com original Home Page

TV Section New & Old

Telecoms.com TV Section

Telecoms.com original TV Section

Opinion Pages and Magazine Download Pages

Telecoms.com Opinion Section

Telecoms.com Magazine Section

Visit the Telecoms.com site.