It's a Kentico site fest!

Been a busy few weeks here at Oc Digi. We've launched 4 sites in the past week alone, all built on Kentico, our preferred CMS platform. Firstly up went an inward investment site for a North Oxfordshire District Council, www.cherwell-m40.co.uk. Next, a completely new re-brand of our parent site, www.oculus.co.uk, take a look as we've got a great new look and feel - lots more to come there. Thirdly, we launched an international congress site for a client, www.ihacongress.org, to which we're now also building a full programme feature, extensive registration process and payment gateway - that'll be getting launched in the next 1-2 months I should think. Finally, we're really pleased to have launched our initial full site build for new client Bureau van Dijk - it's a portal covering the intriguing world of mergers and acquisitions - www.mandaportal.com. So, loads of activity, loads of Kentico features used, and very happy clients with their new sites and CMS capability!

What else? Well, since becoming the first Kentico Certified Training Partner in mainland UK in May this year, we've been busy on that front delivering courses to Content Administrators and Developers. courses have been at our premises in Reading and also on-site with clients. There's lots of interest here, even from other Kentico Partners. As a result we're now running two formal scheduled courses of each in September and October, see http://www.kentico.com/Training/Training-Schedule.aspx and http://www.oculus.co.uk/News/Oculus-Digital-now-offers-Kentico-Certified-Traini.

Back to the site build stuff, we've just had a approval to build a new site for a networking company, we're just specifying a membership system and integrated site for an international trade association, and we're also supporting a major FTSE client with their site implementation and upgrades - ALL in Kentico CMS.

Phew...looking forward to the summer hols to catch some breath :-)

We won!! BEST Educational Website based on KenticoCMS

Thanks to everyone who voted, thanks to you we won best Educational Website! Suffice to say we're chuffed, as we fended off Uni of Toronto and an Australian company. Thanks to our client CfBT Education Trust too. The site's at: www.lotc.org.uk

VOTE FOR US!! Education site of the year

Sorry, some unashamed self-promotion here...we've entered a global competition for the best Education site based on our preferred CMS platform, Kentico. Go on, vote for us and let's see if we can win gold! You need to vote for all 12 categories, ours is the 3rd category (Education) and our site is the middle option: www.lotc.org.uk. THANKS! (We'll find out our fate on 5 Dec and we'll update the blog then).

About www.oculusdigital.co.uk

About the site...

Our intention from the outset was to build the main part of this site - covering the core offering of who we are, what we do and for whom - in just one page of HTML. We achieved this although we always knew the site would need to grow and evolve with extra pages being inevitable. Just looking at the main single page for a moment, a lot of content gets loaded into the browser from the server in one hit. But we wanted to hide, or at least not show it all obviously, in one go. Rather we believe in users interacting with sites and so we wanted an interactive, intuitive experience for visitors. Using jquery in the main we built the reveal features into the 'About us' and 'Capabilities' sections, and added in some more complexity to the 'Work' section to show a series of images, each of which has captions, within each work example (every image is there for a reason, hence the caption). On this we've layered a neat Flash-like carousel, but it's not Flash. Another key requirement was to make the site entirely accessible - we're great believers in this. With the content we have and in trying to push the boundaries on a one-page site, this became a real challenge. The 'Work' section in particular has gone through a number of iterations before we finally got it to its current state - where we're happy with it.

We didn't want to overly clutter and go social networking mad. In the main we sell to businesses and the real application of social networking tools remains largely inappropriate for firms. However, a twitter feed seemed a good compromise and we've now set up OculusDigital accounts on Blogger, LinkedIn, Facebook and we have a YouTube channel.

Almost as we launched we also decided to run a campaign on optimising websites for mobile devices. This is such an important area for companies to consider. Go back 10 years and we were trying to convince companies to have a website - many still wavered. Now, everyone's got a site. But we're going to go through the same process now with mobiles. It's a separate channel, or medium. Yes, much of the content and branding can be retained, but the delivery mechanism has to be treated differently. We're so committed to this that we had to dedicate some web space to it and we broke our own best-laid plan for a one-page site: we now have 2 pages!

But this is really just the start. We’ve got tonnes of knowledge and expertise in this digital/web/online arena that we’re keen to share. Over time we will add to and enhance this site. So keep watching – following us on twitter will be the easiest way to receive updates.

I hope this is a useful insight into a web design/development's team approach to our own work. You will rarely, if ever, see this type of overview online. Why do it? Because we're passionate about our subject, we believe in our own abilities and, hey, didn't some firm once say "it's good to talk"!

Up, up and away

We've launched - YAAAY!! OculusDigital is now live and real: www.oculusdigital.co.uk