PortfolioGriffith REVIEW
Griffith REVIEW is Australia's pre-eminent hardcopy quarterly magazine of ideas and analysis and it is published in Brisbane. On Line Opinion which we publish for The National Forum is Australia's leading online journal of ideas and analysis. It is also published in Brisbane. So when Griffith REVIEW decided that it should become an online journal as well as an offline one, it was natural that they would want to take advantage of our ten years of experience in this area. The Griffith REVIEW site looks deceptively simple but is really quite complex. It is important that a journal have a content management system that a variety of staff can use and that can be adapted if fashions or needs change. We built the site using Joomla as the basic content management system, but with extensive customisation including a number of extensions such as VirtueMart as the Shopping Cart system, Fireboard as the community forum, and PodcastGenerator for publishing downloadable podcasts. Editorial staff at the Griffith REVIEW were very specific in how they wanted the site to look and wanted the design to convey a sense of separate editions as much as possible. The end result is a resounding success from all points of view. Julie Bishop
Political websites have unique requirements. While many politicians are content to treat their website like an online brochure, the ones who understand the web realise that it needs to be a community hub and treat it more like a street corner meeting. These politicians understand that they work for us, and that we want to be able to talk to them as well as see what they are doing. Julie Bishop's site has all the standard features you would expect, but it also incorporates PHPList to power her email newsletter, and more importantly LimeSurvey, so she can do sophisticated polling of her constituents and other groups as required. This is another Joomla site and these technologies integrate well with it. The site also incorporates Community Builder which gives Julie options for extending the site to create online communities. The Next Level
David Moore approached us to build a site for his new communications consultancy. He needed a site that provided basic information about his practice, but also demonstrated his unique proposition. This is also a Joomla site and it incorporates blogging and surveying as well as a newsletter. Everyone has a website, and everyone wants it to be number one on Google for the search terms they want to own. The best way to achieve that is a site which is honest, with frequently changing content, and which demonstrates your capability in your area of expertise. It needs to mention the key words about the right number of times and have links to and from high quality sites. The best way to encourage good quality sites to link to you is to have good material. This site is a repository for David's articles which are frequently published in the leading newspapers, showcases his talents, and also hosts polls that he is conducting as part of his community consultation practice. Roger Fry & Co
Whilst we generally use Joomla or WordPress as our content management system we also use our own proprietary system CAMS when it is appropriate. CAMS is not flexible like Joomla or WordPress, but it is very easy to use, and it produces a good looking site on a tight budget. An additional bonus is that it has a newsletter module which automatically incorporates content posted to the site. Roger has a long-established boutique training consultancy. His staff are very busy so the ease of updating CAMS appealed to him, as well as the newsletter module. The largest market for this content management system is politicians, with our latest being one built for Queensland Deputy Premier Paul Lucas. Australian Council for New Urbanism
The ACNU 2008 Conference was held in Brisbane. The Australian Council for New Urbanism is a group of planners and architects who subscribe to new urbanist planning and design principles. They are an example of a "virtual" organisation that does not maintain offices and is a network of individuals and firms. For them the website would be their organisation. The site also needed to showcase their conference and archive presentations from it and previous ones. We used our proprietary CAMS system for the solution. CAMS has a number of fixed modules as well as a limitless number of custom pages. The custom pages were configured to deal with the conference while standard modules were used for media releases and archiving. We also managed the website for them. Helene Young
When you sign a book contract these days the first thing the publisher asks is "Where is your blog site?" Once she had come down from the excitement of signing her first ever book contract, Helene Young was asking herself that question as well. We used WordPress to build a simple but elegant site. The site has to showcase the book when it is available, but over time it also needs to let readers build a relationship with the author. The 'net makes new demands on authors that they never faced in the past. Most writers have a day job. Helene combines writing with a full-time job as an airline pilot and has limited time to be her own publicist. WordPress has a simple, easy-to-use interface which makes it easy to administer - definitely a benefit with limited time. Save Hurlstone's Educational Agricultural Property (SHEAP)
This is not a site that we built. SHEAP is a community organisation dedicated to stopping the NSW government from selling off parts of the Hurlstone Agricultural College for a subdivision. The site had been built by volunteers, but the organisation realised that it could be more effective. Our role was to renovate the site and add some features, like a petition, to it. It is a demonstration that apparently small differences in design can make a huge difference in outcomes. The result of our collaboration with SHEAP is that they have cut their cost by building the site themselves, but achieved a professional outcome by engaging us to focus the site and provide strategic and tactical advice. Ecologically Sustainable Design
Wendy Morris and Chip Kaufmann have a very strong presence in Australian townplanning, particularly in the area of enquiry by design. They also have an international reputation. We approached this site on the basis that it should reinforce their very strong position in their industry by showcasing their projects and becoming an online resource that could be used by students, academics, clients and other practitioners in their industry. The site has been built using Joomla so that they can easily add material to it. It is essentially a library and will rate well on most search terms valuable to ESD. The aim of the site is to reinforce the strength of ESD's professional reputation as well as keeping them top-of-mind via good search engine rankings. |