Novate: Website design.

With all our web designs, our aim is to keep things straightforward, and wherever possible, give the customer control over the content. This means sites that are database driven, and have pages where the site owners can contribute themselves without having to go back to the designer. Our experience is mainly with community sites where there are multiple authors at different locations.

Techniques that we use:

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, permit the content of the page to be separated from the design. This permits very easy changes to the style of the page, whilst keeping the content the same.

ASP or Active Server Pages, are web pages that are programmed so that the server can do some processing of the page before it is displayed. This allows pages to be populated with content from a database before being sent to the client. Since the content of the page is derived from the database, simple forms may be used to collect data from contributors before being displayed.

Recent projects:

Paws N Paws (www.pawsnpaws.co.uk)

Paws N Paws based in Halfway to the south of Sheffield provide dog walking, cat sitting and pet taxi services in local areas such as Eckington and Killamarsh. The design of the site was influenced by existing printed promotional literature. Clear and colourful images of dogs, cats and small pets such as a guinea pig were added to enhance the friendliness of the site.

Search engine optimisation techniques were used to ensure the site appears against geographic searches.

Holiday In The Tatras (www.holidayinthetatras.co.uk)

Holiday in the Tatras describes a holiday apartment in the High Tatra Mountains - a skiing resort in Slovakia. A content management system was used to allow the site to be edited by the owner at any time.

Ann State (www.annstate.co.uk)

Ann is an Image Consultant / Style Consultant based in Sheffield, England. Ann feels passionately about clothes and the effect of them on individuals, by using her skills and knowledge she helps people find their perfect style.

Ann came to Novate as a referral from an existing customer and wanted a clean, brochure type site to best illustrate her products and services. Producing a unique design within budget was paramount.

Booked Live (www.bookedlive.com)

Booked Live is a plug-in availability calendar/diary for holiday lettings. It allows a site owner to insert a calendar into his/her own website so that visitors can see up to the minute availability. The calendar is administered through the bookedlive website and the results appear instantly on their own website.

Sinful Desires (www.sinful-desires.co.uk)

Sinful Desires make fine hand-made corsets. A website was required that would show off the range of custom corset designs available, and also handle the ordering process where personal measurements must be supplied by the customer. Novate Ltd consulted on the right look and feel for the site, and then came up with an elegant design, partly using a database for the product catalog, but then with static pages for the fabric images and static content. Sinful Desires is based in North Nottinghamshire, UK.

Dawn Delacey (www.dawndelacey.co.uk)

Dawn is an image consultant based in Nottingham. At present, all that is required is a simple web version of a business card. The design from Dawn's existing business cards was interpreted for web use.

AQUABOX (www.aquabox.org)

Aquabox provides the immediate aid necessary in the event of a disaster providing safe clean drinking water and basic hardware essentials for living. Volunteers from all over the UK take boxes and fill them with humanitarian aid. These boxes are then stored and shipped to disaster areas when required. More importantly than being a container for the aid, the box is also a water filtration system and once emptied and fitted with filter and treatment tablets provides up to 1100 litres of safe drinking water.

Novate provided a complete overhaul of the system, and incorporated a news section where items are published directly by the Aquabox team, and a Paypal connected donations area.

Nottingham Insurance Services (www.nottinghaminsuranceservices.com)

Nottingham Insurance Services provides independent financial advice for the Nottingham area, including Ravenshead, Mansfield, Sutton in Ashfield, Kirkby in Ashfield and surrounding areas. Services include mortgage, pension, life assurance advice and tax efficient investment products.

Novate re-engineered the site to give the same look and feel as a previous version, but removed all Flash components to make the site search engine friendly, optimising keywords and content, providing Google Site Map and submission of the site to several search engines.

Peak Outdoors (www.peak-outdoors.co.uk)

Peak Outdoors wanted a simple to implement e-commerce system for their range of camping, caravanning and outdoor leisure equipment. Novate implemented a store, customised for Peak Outdoors, advised on search engine optimisation, enabled the site for electronic payments and provided general support for the business.

C Gascoigne Electrical Services (www.cgascoigne.co.uk)

Thumbnail of the Gascoigne Electrical homepage

Simple and Bold advert for C Gascoigne Electrical Services. Clarity and speed of deployment were important considerations as well as a clean design using CSS for layout and menus to make the (few) pages search engine friendly. C Gascoigne Electrical are a family owned business based in Loughborough undertaking all aspects of Electrical work in the East Midlands.

Johns Opticians (www.johnsopticians.co.uk)

Thumbnail of the Johns Opticians homepage

Johns needed a straightforward website that informed local customers of products and services. A simple cross-browser and standards compliant site, with a few nice features such as the curved text around the images irrespective of the text size.

Derby Cloth House (www.derbyclothhouse.co.uk)

Thumbnail of the Derby Cloth House homepage

This local retailer has a site that they can maintain themselves in terms of expanding and reducing the product catalog. The site is in part, database driven and holds product information and images. Although not trading over the internet, the site allows the visitor to create a shopping basket of items in which they are interested, and this is then emailed to the company for telephone / postal followup

Homestyling (www.homestyling-uk.com)

A small ASP based site with a user configurable portfolio area. Some pages are static and only updated by the designer. Other pages need to be more dynamic for the display of a constantly updating portfolio. Maintenance pages were provided that permit browser based editing of any of these pages by the customer.

Sharmas Fabrics (www.sharmasfabrics.co.uk)

The site for Sharmas Fabrics features product galleries where thumbnails of fabric swatches are displayed. The swatches are displayed in two sizes. A database on the webserver maintains details associated with each of the images. Maintenance pages were provided that permit editing of any of the descriptions by the customer. The customer is also able to add new products at any time.

Sheffield and District Landlords Association (www.sadla.org.uk)

This is a community site where a private members area was required along with a forum where members could meet and discuss ideas. The site is hosted on a Windows 2003 server and uses ASP. The forum is written in ASP and the secure areas of the site are controlled by a database of members.
For this site, the design already existed and this was adapted to accomodate the new features without affecting the look and feel. The menu system is built using mixture of CSS and Javascript.

The site was completed in the timescales required, and an excellent referral letter received.

Rotary District 1220

This site has been designed to share information between nearly 2000 members. There are many different features of the site, including calendar, databases, member lookup, email contact centre, forum, virus information with realtime threats feed. The menu system is java based and was purchased as a component and then integrated into the design.

In late 2003, the site was a finalist in the "Best of the Rotary Web" competition - a worldwide competition. The award certificate

District 1220 microsites

The microsites are a part of the Rotary District 1220 site, but managed seperately. By holding the data for the web pages in a database, we were able to create small self maintained club sites within the main umbrella of the District site. The microsites feature a news area, calendar, image upload and contact pages.

Ravenshead Rotary Club

The Ravenshead site is a small vehicle for the members of that club. Of note are the photo archive pages. These are self designing depending upon the content of the directory. All the navigation etc is generated by ASP scripts based on what files it finds in the current directory. Click here for an example of a photo library

Associated Sites

These are sites that Novate has had some involvement with, but are not representative of our webdesign skills. Activities can involve adhoc changes to the design, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), web hosting hosting, domain names.

Challenge Consulting (www.challengeconsulting.co.uk)

Challenge Consulting are providers of management training courses and training consultancy in the Nottingham Area. Novate provides web hosting and updates to an existing website.

Ethical Aesthetics (www.ethicalaesthetics.com)

Ethical Aesthetics provides ethical services and products to professional Spas, Clinics and Beauty Salons. Web hosting by Novate Ltd.

Lambley Day Nursery (www.lambleydaynursery.com)

Day Nursery in the Lambley Village area of Nottinghamshire. Excellent quality childcare in a picturesque environment.Novate provides search engine optimisation.

Microlise Limited (www.microlise.com)

Microlise are an IT Systems Integrator and ISV, specialising in mobile asset and resource management. Their Fleet and Distribution product covers vehicle tracking, electronic proof of delivery, routing and scheduling and lone worker. Novate provides web hosting, domain names, SSL certificates and DNS services.