News
BridgingUnit coded and added a jobs board to the site of CathedralsPlus built in the open source PHP framework CodeIgniter. This simple board allows administrators to list jobs for the site’s members, and for them to be added and expire from the site at designated times.
Are you looking for a job at a Cathedral? Go take a look.
Marc du Ry is a dealer in medieval art and a long-standing customer. He needed to be able to better manage his website. Updates and moving content around needed to be easier. He also needed a solution that wasn’t tied to software on his computer as he has bases on the continent as well as here in the UK and needs to be able to work wherever he finds himself.
ExpressionEngine allows Marc to update his website from any computer with access to the internet. We built a comparable architecture to that of his previous site, but set things up so that he can easily move details of his works of art from one section of the website to another. We then moved across the existing design, code, and all his content, and managed the switch so that the old pages were smoothly redirected to the new ones. A properly managed members’ section was added to the site where those who sign up can access private content and have first pick of the treasures that he sources. Visit his website to see these beautiful artefacts for yourself.
Three custom addons were written as part of the project which will be available here soon for other users of ExpressionEngine.
ProFundCom is a software company that provides a service for tracking where and how your email communication is received, offering insight into its effectiveness and your best prospects. They target a very particular niche: the asset and fund management sector.
BridgingUnit was contacted because they wanted to migrate their existing website across to ExpressionEngine 2. They had purchased the software and hosting and wanted to move away from their previous content management system, which had proved awkward to use and rather problematic from a security point of view. They needed something that was more solid and reliable.
We took their pre-existing design and content and moved it across to a new installation, re-purposing the architecture for better URLs and added some new sections for news, events and press releases so that ProFundCom could better promote and talk about their various successes and what they were up to. We then managed the domain change so that existing URLs were smoothly moved across to the new ones, so as to ensure no lost traffic.
We put together our first addon for ExpressionEngine 2 as part of this project and it will be available here soon.
As Artisan Software Tools portfolio of products has grown, so has the mass of support information, marketing material and accessories available for them. BridgingUnit designed and built a download area for their site where all these sorts of things are gathered together and they’re presented in an organised and easy to locate way. Further navigational tools will be added as the area continues to expand.
The winners of the inaugural British Wildlife Photography Awards were announced at the evening opening of the BWPA exhibition at Hoopers Gallery. Awards were presented by Nick Baker, naturalist and broadcaster. You can view the winning entries online, or go and visit the exhibition as it tours the country.
The British Wildlife Photography Awards closed a little after the published deadline to cope with the slew of last minute entries. Since then the BWPA elves have been hard at work and we’ve extended the backend site functionality to help provide reports to aid the shortlisting process (requiring another custom ExpressionEngine plugin). The difficult task of judging has begun, with the Judges having to work their way through thousands of images. Everyone has been very impressed by the quality of the photos submitted. It’s a cliché, but it’s going to be a very difficult final choice.
We’ve been lucky enough to see behind the scenes and there are some stunning pictures that really open your eyes to what else shares these small islands with us. It’s been great fun, and very interesting indeed to be party to the whole process. We look forward to seeing the final winners and viewing the opening exhibition at Hooper’s Gallery in September.
Artisan Software Tools produces a range of software for modelling enterprise software architecture geared towards users in a wide array of industries. They are a rapidly expanding company and it is difficult for their website to keep pace with the speed of their change and evolution. They contacted BridgingUnit back in April to help take over development on their existing ExpressionEngine-based site which had originally been produced by Who Made Me.
Since then we’ve been providing support and working on day to day additions to it as well as aiding larger projects. We set up a development server to enable us to road-test things prior to moving across to the live site, added a French-language face to a subset of the site and in July we consolidated the way that languages were handled across the site so that the French, German and Italian languages now each has its own home root URL. Over time we expect that the full website will be translated, but for now the per-language material has been organised together into one place to make it more friendly to use.
The British Wildlife Photography Awards opened for submissions at the beginning of April. There are seven different categories to enter for the adult competition and separate awards for photographers who are under 18 and also for school or youth groups. For your chance to win a prestigious photography award, cash first prize of £5,000 and exposure in a nationwide touring exhibition or various other prizes, go and check out the competition’s requirements and enter your photos before the 31st July.
This second phase of the site involved building in the ability for entrants to register, pay for their entries and submit their photos, and for the judges to view entries and make their shortlists prior to the final judging at the beginning of August. All this functionality was added into the ExpressionEngine build utilising the built in simple commerce module, Paypal’s website payment standard account and by the production by BridgingUnit of four custom-coded plugins, one custom fieldtype, and an extension. One of these ExpressionEngine plugins has already been released to the community and some of the others will be made available at some point soon.
On the internet success breeds success. We’d noticed that a lot of traffic was coming from Tripdvisor to boutique bed and breakfast, 38 St Giles. We’d also noticed that their reviews were flagged up in Google Local which powers the mapped section at the top of its search results page for locally related searches. We knew too that reading other people’s reviews is often a good way to help convince a prospective client that their decision will be the right one. Tripadvisor wisely provide a widget that allows you to display the reviews that their users have provided on your own website, so we added it to a reviews page at 38 St Giles and customised it to fit in with their design.
But in having your profile raised you also can become a target for some of the lower forms of life that lurk out there on the web. Some people write nice things about you, but others may try to take advantage of you, and automated spam messages sent through their contact form were becoming a persistent problem to 38 St Giles. So we added a captcha field to the form and that has helped cut fake messages substantially.
Marc du Ry is a dealer that specialises in medieval art. He decided that it was time to add a copy of his latest catalogue to his site and expand things to show more of his recent sales. Go and have a read of his essay titled ‘Line’, look at the pictures of the beautiful and rare pieces that illustrate it and see his recent sales.
Norwich Cathedral had an online shop built for them over 4 years ago. The golden padlock and the crucial ‘s’ in the ‘https’ are symbols of trust and hallmarks of security for ecommerce. Whenever consumer associations tell you about the signs to look for that the online shop you’re planning to buy from is kosher - these are always the key things you’re told to look for even though the site may actually be secure without them if it has other encryption measures in place. And various studies suggest that without them you stand to lose between 5 and 20% of your sales. Aside from these signs, you can also add a trust mark to your site - these are branded links to the authorities issuing security certificates that establish that they really did issue it to you. And, according to Verisign, adding one of these should reassure the 70-80% of UK online shoppers who either only make purchases from sites displaying them or who would bail out of the purchase process if they didn’t see one. These measures are obviously very important commercially when this year ecommerce in the UK stands to reach £40 billion and the general public is ever more acutely aware of and concerned by credit card fraud and identity theft. With their host Mainline installing the SSL and security certificate and BridgingUnit integrating it all into their shopping cart software, sales at the Cathedral’s shop can now hope to benefit from the sense of safety and security these signals provide.
A smaller project this: in association with non-centered design, production of a showreel for Measure so they can interest potential investors and sponsors in what they’re doing. Also a simple slideshow for their home page to give visitors a flavour of what they’re about.
Launch of a dynamically generated and managed glossary for Eastern Cathedrals. try out the glossary.
The existing design for the EasternCathedrals group was expanded and brought up to date with accessibility requirements. Read the case study.