You know it’s getting close to Christmas when…
Another Star Wars film hits the big screen (let’s hope it’s better than the last one eh?).
The boys of the NYPD choir are still singing “Galway Bay”.
Presents are chosen based on Amazon delivery dates.
Of course, it’s also traditional to look back over 2019 and look forward to 2020. So, throw another log on the fire, top up your sherry, and sit back as we whizz through some highlights of Intuitiv’s 2019.
And what a year it’s been…
Umbraco is the CMS of choice for the likes of Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Carlsberg Group and Amnesty International. We love it too.
Days of in-depth Umbraco training sessions and tests led to us becoming an Umbraco Certified Partner. This guarantees that we have the track record, skills and knowledge to work with the Umbraco CMS to the very highest standards.
Pretty much every site we build now uses Umbraco to power the CMS functionality.
Click here to find out more about our Umbraco websites.
As part of our SEO campaign we successfully launched our new blog this year.
We’ve covered a range of webby topics so far, including…
And the most popular of all… 25 web developer songs for Christmas
With our friends at Common Ground, we worked on an SEO campaign to improve the ranking of our website for specific search terms and locations.
This involved…
Site structure updates
Content updates and creation
Location-specific landing pages
Backlinks from portfolio and review sites
Blog posts
Of course, this is an ongoing project but we’ve already had some great results:
Top 5 for “Oxford web design”
Page one for “Umbraco web design”, “Aylesbury web design” and other key search terms
Increased month on month and year on year site visits
Increased enquiries
Working with Common Ground we recently embarked on our first Facebook campaign.
This involved designing Facebook adverts and landing pages that featured unicorns, rockets and cowboys! These adverts and pages encouraged users to contact us for a free website design brief template and a free quote.
Here’s an example landing page.
We’ve had plenty of positive leads coming from this campaign so far, so they’ll be more in the New Year.
In response to the increase in enquiries from start-ups and smaller companies, we began offering a new service.
We created a new 'vanilla' website design template that's integrated with a multi-tenanted Umbraco CMS platform. We customise this template design to suit each client, reflecting their branding and style. Clients then access their area of the Umbraco CMS platform.
Clients get a professional, customised, mobile-responsive website design, and enjoy the benefits of an Umbraco CMS, but at a relatively low cost - a perfect way for a company to start building their web presence!
Andy, our designer, created a free B2B website design template for visitors to our website to download. It was also uploaded to various portfolio and review websites.
The design is fairly neutral so it is flexible enough to customise for any B2B website. The PSD files are organised so any designer or developer can pick them up and be halfway to creating a well-designed website in no time.
The free B2B website design template can be found here.
Due to the increase in work, experienced .NET web developer Chris Tilt joined us fulltime in September.
You can find out more about him in our blog post “Interview with a vampire web developer”.
We’re not allowed to name them, but we secured a large project from a very famous financial company, which will keep us going well into next year.
We put in place a dedicated team for the project and it’s encouraged us to evolve a more Agile development approach to website design.
You can read more about our Agile approach here.
And we didn’t even mention the BBQs, pub lunches, birthday cakes and babies!
Looks like next year’s going to get off to a busy start too.
There are some more large, exciting projects in the pipeline and we’ll be evolving our ‘vanilla’ template option further too for smaller businesses. Also, we’ll be taking steps into the world of Progressive Web Apps.
Have a great Christmas and New Year, and we look forward to our paths crossing again in 2020.
P.S. In the meantime, email hello@intuitiv.net or call 01844 888 777 if you need any help with your website project. Advice is always friendly and free!