It’s been a little while since we last updated the blog with the latest goings on at Union Room. We have had the pleasure of working on some very exiting new projects, as well as producing some of our best work to date for existing clients. The next month or two promises to see us launch work that we are immensely proud of for a range of our clients, you can read more about that below.

We also have a new member of the team since we last posted an update to the blog. We are delighted to have added Danny Trippett to our design team, and we look forward to him working on some of the exciting projects that we have in the pipeline.

Launched

Fusion Group

The Fusion Group are a unique financial services organisation with headquarters in London and Nairobi. The aim of the Fusion Group is to deliver healthy returns for investors and to provide growing African businesses access to innovative and effective financial solutions.

Projector created a fantastic brand for us to work with, and we helped create unique areas for each of Fusion’s businesses; Fusion Investment Management and Fusion Capital. The business is growing quickly, and work is ongoing on all area of the website.

Pearson Engineering Services

Pearson Engineering Services are a specialist manufacturer of high specification, bespoke fabrications. We developed a brand new website for the business, featuring a new design and WordPress CMS, as part of our ongoing releationship with the Reece Group.

Institute of Water

The Institute of Water, founded in 1945, is the only professional body that exclusively supports the careers of anyone working in the UK water industry. They came to us needing a new website that more accurately reflected their brand values, and which provided more interaction with it’s members. As well as a full redesign, the website contains a bespoke CRM system which handles events and invoicing for the Institute’s entire membership database.

Reece Group

Reece Group Ltd, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, is the holding group for five engineering companies that operate across the globe. It was one of the first university breakout businesses and was established with innovation at it’s heart. Their organisations operate in the defence, subsea, construction, oil and gas sectors delivering engineering excellence and innovation.

New projects

SIMPSON

Based in York, SIMPSON co-ordinate and manage fit-out and construction projects across the UK. We have designed a brand new website which showcases the diverse range of high profile, award winning projects within their portfolio, and the high quality standards and expertise that SIMPSON can offer prospective clients. The site is fully content managed and comes with a host of features including an interactive project map and timeline which charts the development and growth of the business since it was formed in 1922.

Story Homes

Story Homes build stylish, award winning, high quality new homes in Cumbria, the North East of England, Dumfries and Galloway. We are currently working closely with the team at Story to build a fantastic new website that more accurately reflects the quality of their product and the service that a customer would expect from the business. Look out for a full case study when we launch in June.

Pearson Engineering Limited

Pearson Engineering is a privately owned UK company that develops combat engineer systems and equipment to meet the needs of both British and foreign armed forces. As part of our ongoing relationship with the Reece Group, we are currently working through the design stage of the project with the Pearson team.

Lodges.co.uk

As part of our long term relationship with Parkdean, we have been working on a new version of the Lodges.co.uk website. In addition to their complete brand overhaul, we have introduced a ton of new functionality that helps users of the website to find and request information easily and quickly.

Jeweller’s Guild

The Jeweller’s Guild are a family run, independent jewellery retailer. Established in 2001, the business has three branches (soon to be four) offering bespoke, hand-finished jewellery. We had the pleasure of visiting the main workshop earlier this year to get an understanding of how the unique jewellery items are created, and we are aiming to promote this process on the website. Keep an eye out for the new website appearing in May.

Tharsus

Our latest appointment sees us working with Blyth-based manufacturing business Tharsus. The new website will be live in early June, so keep an eye out for more information about this project on our blog.

Lime Street Property

We will shortly be working with a new property management business, Lime Street Property, on their new website. The Lime Street team really want to stand out from the current property management field, so it promises to be an interesting project for us to work on.

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Around Christmas time, we launched a brand new website for Airowear, a leading designer and supplier of equestrian body protectors. With a reputation for design expertise incorporating the latest technology, Airowear were also keen to use the new website to promote their unique offering of body protectors in both men’s and women’s sizes, designed to fit their body shape.

As well as these core messages, the website also needed to bring a fresh new look to their entire product range, to give stockists access to key sales materials and to develop a German language version of the website given this is a key market for the business.

Extensive product range

All of the product pages feature an extensive gallery of photos, all with the ability to zoom and rotate using jQuery. Full product information, features, colour options, size guides and fitting information is readily available, whilst users can also read reviews from other users and submit their own.

Stockist Directory

Airowear have hundreds of stockists across their core markets of the UK, Ireland and Germany, and many more across the globe. The stockist directory allows customers to find their nearest stockist via a country and/or postcode search, and contact them direct or visit their website.

Interactive Design Tool

The website features an interactive design tool to allow customers to design their own customised body protector. Users can then share the design via social media, download or order via an authorised Airowear stockist using the unique design reference.

Tradezone

Tradezone has been developed specifically with Airowear’s national and international stockists in mind. The latest product photography, advertising, sales literature and documents are all easily available via this section of the website, allowing Airowear to bring consistency and efficiency to the distribution of their sales materials. In turn, the stockists can better market and promote the entire Airowear product range, increasing sales opportunities. The Tradezone also features an amended version of the design tool which allows stockists to submit online orders for customised body protectors on behalf of customers via their unique log-in.

The completed website has delivered on all of the project objectives and also brought real efficiencies to the client’s process via the Tradezone section of the website. The site has drawn positive feedback from customers and stockists alike, and we hope to continue to work closely with Airowear on further digital marketing during the course of 2013 and beyond.

Click here to visit the website.

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Arsenal.com

Back in 2009, we published a blog post which ranked the websites of all English Premier League football clubs. A lot of clubs have launched new websites since we published that article, and Arsenal are the latest club to relaunch their main website.

As you would expect of a website the size of Arsenal.com, the website caters for a range of devices and some of the new features like more in-depth player profiles work really well.

Visit the website.

Oreo advert

The Super Bowl guarantees a flood of new advertising campaigns, and our favourite this year is Oreo’s new TV ad which you can see below.

Tweetping

We all know how popular Twitter is, but the Tweetping website really highlights just how much data is constantly being published to the platform.

Institute of Water

We have been working on the new Institute of Water website since late last year, and we launched the website earlier this week. As well as a full redesign, the website contains a bespoke CRM system which handles events and invoicing for the Institute’s entire membership database.

Visit the website.

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We would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year. We are back in the office on Wednesday the 2nd of January.

We would like thank all of our clients, suppliers and partners for their support this year, and the very best for 2013.

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The Week in Web returns after a week’s holiday. This week have an interesting approach to social media from Surrey Police, a new mobile site from the Guardian and a new website launch from yours truly.

Pacific Rim

The trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s new movie, Pacific Rim, was released on Wednesday and we think it looks great. There’s lots of BAAARRRMMMMM in the trailer as well, if that’s your thing.

Guardian on the go

The Guardian’s new mobile website went live a week or so ago. It’s a marked improvement on the previous version and there’s some very nice typography on show.

Tweet stylin’

Surrey Police managed to highlight the dangerous weather conditions earlier in the week by tweeting in the style of Vanilla Ice.

Airowear

We launched the new Airowear website recently, and we’re very proud of the work that’s gone into the project. We will be posting a case study about the project soon, but take a look at the nifty XC colour tool.

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Earlier this summer, Union Room was given the opportunity to create a new website for ITV SignPost, the team behind British Sign Language translated television programming for ITV’s family of channels. The website was recently launched to the public, and we are delighted to be able to speak about the project for the first time.

The previous version of the SignPost website had been in place for several years, and we were tasked with bringing the website’s design up to date to reflect the company’s new branding and provide more information to the user about the processes involved in producing this kind of work.

Website content

We worked closely with the SignPost team to come up with a content plan for the new website. This involved discussions around what potential users (of all types) would require from the website, and how this might be presented on each of the relevant sections.

SignPost guide their customers through what can seem like a complex process, making it easy to understand what is required from both parties. It is this kind of information that we wanted to promote on the website.

Wireframing

Once content was agreed, we began to work on the website’s wireframes. We typically produce several variations of a homepage as a starting point – this gives us a good opportunity to experiment with different layouts and gain feedback from the client on the positioning of specific elements.

We really enjoy working closely with the client in this phase, as we find it gives everyone an opportunity to have an input on how the website will ‘work’.

As we progress through the wireframing stage, we like to introduce more design elements as we gather decisions from the client. We find this helps provide a more accurate representation of how imagery etc will be presented in the full visual. The wireframe you see below is the version we decided to take into the design stage.

Design

I mentioned earlier in this post that SignPost had recently undertaken a brand redesign, so this was a primary focus of ours when beginning to look at the visuals for the new website.

One major advantage of a thorough wireframing process is that all major layout decisions have been taken, meaning we just have the task of applying the brand guidelines and a set style to the elements on the wireframe.

This is another point in the project where the client’s input is important, as we like to gather opinions on everything from the way in which image galleries might function, to the use of colours, typeface and specific imagery.

After several rounds of tweaks, we arrived at a version that the SignPost team were happy to take forward into the development stage.

Development & launch

We worked alongside the internal ITV development team throughout the build process, to ensure the files we delivered met internal standards and were consistent with previous builds. For external testing and sign off, we used ITV’s version control system.

The project has been an extremely rewarding experience for our team, as the website also aims to raise awareness about accessibility and how businesses can bring their media (websites, videos, documents etc) into line with the Equality Act 2010. There are approximately 9 million people in the UK that are deaf and hard of hearing, meaning there is a huge potential target audience to tap into.

We asked the SignPost team to comment on their experience of working with Union Room on the project:

“From our initial tender enquiry, through to development and delivery of the new design, Union Room’s creativity has resulted in a stylish new corporate website.

Their professionalism in understanding our core target audience was a significant factor for us commissioning the work and the process of engagement throughout the project ensured the brief was completed to an excellent standard.

Our website was in need of a major overhaul to better reflect our new business strategy and thanks to Union Room’s expertise in redesigning the site, we now have an excellent new platform to showcase our services.”

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This week’s news includes rude hashtags, maintaining freedom on the Internet and the world’s oldest working digital computer.

A free and open Internet

It’s easy to take the Internet for granted, it’s just something we expect to be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, what if that was were to change, and governments began to dictate what we could access. Google have launched a #freeandopen campaign, which aims to raise awareness of Internet legislation and initiatives.

#Susanalbumparty

A bit of a PR disaster from the team behind Susan Boyle’s new album launch. Take a look at some other high-profile hashtag disasters.

B&O Play

We came across a lovely piece of technology today, with an equally lovely website.

3D Printing

The cost of 3D printing has fallen considerably in recent years, meaning people can finally begin making real world items using lego

Dekatron

Ever complained about your computer being a little on the slow side? Take a look at the world’s oldest original working digital computer being rebooted, and you may reassess your current technology.

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In this week’s post we cover the American election, Jurassic Park and hacking Android. Enjoy.

Making the Jurassic Park Velociraptor

Everyone loves Jurassic Park. I had never really considered the possibility that each of the velociraptors were controlled from the inside.

Ethopian Kids Hack Android

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Take a look.

Four More Years

Barack Obama wasn’t just busy being re-elected this week, he also broke some records on twitter. His ‘Four more years’ tweet is the most retweeted tweet of all time, currently sitting on 800,000+ retweets.

We launched…

The Sanderson Young mobile website has been live for a couple of weeks now, and it’s already making it easier for users to find their dream home. You can read what Sanderson Young had to say about the launch, over on their blog.

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