Notebook Posts | Designition Ltd

Client website wins national award

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Focus Online Management, one of our oldest clients, has won a national award for their online bingo portal WhichBingo UK which was designed by their in-house team and developed by Designition Ltd.

The website is managed using a template driven content management system, developed specifically for purpose, giving them complete control on website design and content. This system is also used on their international bingo portals: WhichBingo USA and QueBingo. Here's their press release with more details:

Leeds-based Focus Online Management have scooped a national award ahead of a Dragon’s Den-funded website. The company’s website WhichBingo UK has been named the Online Bingo Portal of the Year at the Bullet Business Online Bingo Awards 2008.

The awards were held as part of the third annual Online Bingo Summit at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, London. Nominees were selected by a panel of industry leaders and votes were cast by over 250 attendees of the event.

WhichBingo UK beat Dragon’s Den-funded Bingo Alerts and other contenders to claim the title. After collecting the award for best bingo portal, WhichBingo founder Phil Fraser said:

We are thrilled and honoured to win this prestigious award. The award recognises and rewards all of the hard work and effort that the whole team put into creating a site that bingo players enjoy. It’s good that an independent company can beat off the challenge of larger, well-funded, London-based competitors.

WhichBingo UK was launched in September 2004 and is the UK's largest directory of online bingo sites. The site also features game reviews, offers, news, competitions and player comments. Focus Online Management’s operations consist of a range of Online Bingo portals and Online Bingo game sites for the UK, US and Spain.

Related links

Our Content Management Services Explained
Bullet Business Awards 2008
Which Bingo UK

Two new faces at Designition

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce two new members of staff at Designition.

Lee joined us in July from Mode Design where he worked on a number of projects in collaboration with us including Millers Yard and Minster Windows.

Julian joined us in June after completing a HND in Interactive Media. We're showing him the ropes, and we're sure within a few months he'll be as technically brilliant as everyone else.

If you'd like to meet them in person feel free to drop by our office for a chat.

Client feedback: company website redesigns

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We asked two recent clients, who both approached us with a website that wasn't doing their company justice, about their new websites. Here's what they had to say:

Inspired Weddings

The new website looks fantastic, it's functionally easy for us to
manage and it's generated a lot of revenue for our business. The old
website had about 3,000 hits a month. We now get this number every day.

It's helped us bring in lots of new customers. We hardly had any
enquiries from people finding us on Google before. Now, people find the
website, see the magazine, and contact us to advertise in both.
Designition have been easy to deal with, accommodating, and full of good
ideas. They always have answers and solutions to our questions and
problems, often on issues outside their remit!

I'd recommend Designition to any company looking for a new website.

Katie Bibby, Inspired Weddings

Future Energy Surveys

We wanted a website that looked more professional than our old one, to
give the right impression and help attract more customers. We also
needed the website developing quickly, in time for an industry event.

The new website really does fit the bill, and we've received a third
more enquiries since it went live as a result. We found Designition easy
to deal with; they listened to what we had to say, and they got things
done when we needed them.

Ben Wood, Future Energy Surveys

Is your company website giving the wrong impression to potential customers?

Contact us to arrange a free consultation: we'll have a look at your current site, and discuss how we could help you to make it better.

Archbishop's “Leap of Faith” for The Afghanistan Trust charity

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The Archbishop of York is set to do a parachute jump to raise money for the families of soldiers killed or injured in Afghanistan. From The Afghanistan Trust website:

Dr John Sentamu will hurl himself from a plane at 12,500ft with the Parachute Regiment Red Devils display team from RAF Langer near Nottingham in six weeks time on May 27th.

The Archbishop is urging the public to sponsor him to complete the daring parachute jump to generate funds for the Afghanistan Trust - a charity formed to help support soldiers and their families who have served with 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan, and who have been wounded or killed as a consequence.

Designition Ltd, in collaboration with Stone Soup, have set up and donated this website to promote the event and The Afghanistan Trust charity. Good luck John!

Read the full story on The Afghanistan Trust website or make a donation to the trust.

Office open day: free web consultancy

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We’re opening our doors and offering free consultations all day.

Anyone is welcome to pop in to our office at 1-5 Shambles, York any time between 10am and 5pm for a chat about anything we might be able to help you with, no strings attached.

Upcoming dates

Wednesday 19th March
Wednesday 16th April

Free consultation

Need a website for your business, but not sure where to start?
Think that you're existing website could be improved, but not sure how?
Looking for a way to attract more visitors to your website?
Got a great idea for a website and looking for advice on how to implement it?

Then drop in to our office for a chat any time on Wednesday and we'll be happy to give you our advice and opinion, absolutely free. If you'd prefer to arrange a specific time in advance, please call us on 01904 651000.

Are you going to Venturefest Yorkshire 2008?

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We're exhibiting at Venturefest 2008, which takes place on Wednesday 6th February at York Racecourse. From the Venturefest website:

Venturefest Yorkshire 2008 sets out to connect knowledge, technology and innovation based entrepreneurs with everything they need to make them successful. At the 2007 event there were numerous successful pitches for investment and an millions of pounds of business changed hands. For 2008 there will continue to be a series of high profile speakers, informative seminars, 65 commercial exhibitors, an "Innovation Showcase" area as well as exciting and vibrant areas for students in schools and universities from around the Yorkshire region. It is a day not to be missed, and all for FREE.

Come and see us at stand 54 for a chat and a free mystery gift!

Wishing you a Merry Christmas

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 GMT

...and a Happy New Year, from everyone at Designition.

It's been quite a year for us. In the last 12 months, we have:

won 2 awards (for the new York Minster and york-england.com websites),
exhibited at VentureFest (see you again in 2008),
moved our office to the Shambles in the centre of York,
and finally gotten round to launching a website of our own!

But most importantly this year, we've produced 27 world-class websites for budding and established businesses and organisations, both local and national, and we've really enjoyed working with every one of them, and finding out what they're all about.

Just launched: British Association for Chemical Specialities new website and extranet.

A massive thanks to all of our clients and associates for their continued support, and we wish you all a happy and prosperous 2008!

Cheque clearance changes: e-commerce beware

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

New cheque clearance rules coming into effect on 1st December 2007 mean that cheque payments will not be guaranteed until 7 days after being presented to the bank for payment, even if the money has already appeared in your account.

If you're an online seller, it is recommended that you avoid dispatching goods that have been paid for by cheque until the seventh day has passed, unless the cheque payment was secured with a cheque guarantee card.

Welcome to our new website

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

You can now find out about the range of services we offer, browse our extensive portfolio, and read articles about our projects, methodology and contemporary web design issues.

Viewing Site Statistics With AWStats

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 GMT

AWStats presents statstics on one large page. You can navigate the statistics using the menu on the left.

There are several different ways to gauge the amount of traffic your website receives. Here is an explanation of the measurement terms used throughout these statistics:

Unique Visitors - A unique visitor is a computer that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If they make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.
Visits - Number of visits made by all visitors - if a visitor accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, this is counted as one visit.
Pages - The number of individual pages requested by all visitors.
Hits - Counts all files requested by visitors (html, stylesheets, javascript files, images), several of which make up a typical page view.
Bandwidth - Total number of bytes for pages, images and files downloaded by web browsing.
Entry Page - First page viewed by a visitor during their visit.
Exit Page - Last page viewed by a visitor during their visit.
Session Duration - The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit.

Logging on to AWStats

AWStats can be accessed by typing http://www.yoursite.co.uk:2082/frontend/x/stats/awstats.html (replace yoursite.co.uk with the domain name of your web site) into your internet browser
When prompted, enter the username and password you have been provided with.
There may also be a link to AWStats from your website administration area.

Who is visiting the website?

You can see how many people are visiting your website within various periods of time from the Monthly history, Days of month, Days of week and Hours sections.

The Countries section shows what country your visitors are from, and you can see what Operating Systems and Browsers they use in the corresponding sections.

How is the website being found?

The Connecting to site from section shows how people arrive at the website:

Direct address / Bookmarks represents the people who have typed the website URL directly into the browser, or who have bookmarked it in the past and clicked on their bookmark.
Links from an Internet Search Engine shows people who made a search and came from each search engine's website. The Search keyphrases and Search keywords sections below show what people typed into these search engines that lead them to the website.
Links from an external page lists the links on other websites that are used to get to your website.

Click the Full List link next to any of these to view a complete rundown.

How is the website being used?

The Pages-URL section lists the pages visitors are viewing in order of popularity. Click the Entry and Exit links for a ranking of the pages that visitors view first and last during a visit.

The homepage of your site is represented by a lone forward slash (/). The number of times this is an Exit page, for example, represents how many people have only viewed the home page before ending their visit.

You can see how long people spend on the website from the Visits duration section.

Changing timeframe of statistics displayed

All statistics displayed fall within the timescale selected at the top of the page. This will be the current month by default, but you can change this by selecting the month and year from the Reported period option at the top of the page, and clicking OK.

Further Information

More information on AWStats (some of it quite technical) can be found on wikipedia.