Adam's blog

Consult and Design have donated a digital camera in support of young people in North Tyneside and across the North East as the prize for submitting art works to the Collabor8 website in advance of its launch later in the year.

We are very happy to be involved in the Collabor8 project, having worked with young people at the >Phoenix Detatched Youth Project and North Tyneside Council to produce the website with young people at its heart.

Today, Consult and Design launched a brand new website for Including Men. The new site addressed a need for a basic online presence but that integrated with their Twitter account and had a blog that would allow Including Men to share interesting commentary and promote up and coming events like the Development Day they have planned in Newcastle in June.

Including Men brings together leading, practice based, experts on father and male inclusion in the UK to provide training and strategic support and resources to health, social care, early years, learning and family services.

Consult and Design are very happy to have worked with Graduate Gap Year over the last four weeks to get their new website online in super quick time. With a promotional strategy kicking off at the start of April it was vital that we managed to get the site done inside the very tight timescales.

The new site is built in Drupal which gives the Graduate Gap Year team complete control of the site, from the images on the home page slider down to the text of any page.

Dave Greenburg and Donald Lobo gave an insight into the current state of CiviCRM, I've tried to summarise.

Community involvement has grown significantly in the last year. Downloads have grown significantly and our professional services listings now has over 60 organisations providing civicrm services. The forum now has 15,000 and averages about 50 posts per day of which 6 of those most active are not part of the core team. Another great result is that there are many more patches being submitted meaning that more and more developers are contributing to the development of CiviCRM.

So here we are, just a few days to the biggest Drupal event in Europe this year, Drupalcon London 2011. Having been to the last 4 Drupalcons, this is a particularly important one for Consult and Design for a number of reasons:

1. We're very proud to be sponsoring Drupalcon this year
2. Our own Adam Hill is playing an important role as Volunteer Co-ordinator
3. It's the first Drupalcon since we founded Drupal North East
4. Its the biggest European Drupalcon ever, almost doubling in size since Copenhagen last year

As you can imagine its a busy time and we're all really happy to be so involved in this event, its going to be the best yet and we're looking forward to sharing all the goings on when we return.

We are really happy to be sponsoring Drupalcon London taking place in August.

Today we were very humbled and happy to receive an award for "Investment in Children" from the Phoenix Detached Youth Project due to our work with them to develop their website, which is made by young people for young people. We've been working with the Phoenix for 2 years and have enjoyed every minute collaborating with a brilliant group of young people from the Meadow Well and Chirton area to develop a website that they use to highlight the work of the organisation and support the team in their work.

Working with the Phoenix has proven to be some of the most rewarding we've done and we feel absolutely privelaged to be involved and able to contribute in any way to the success of this unique organisation.

Consult and Design are very proud to have founded the Drupal North East user group along with two other local Drupal development companies.

Drupal North East is a user group for developers, themers, designers, administrators and users of Drupal to meet up with like-minded people and share all things Drupal.

After meeting up regularly through networking events, Drupalcons in Paris, Copenhagen and Chicago and discussion on IRC, three local Drupal enthusiasts have come together to help get the meet-ups started and hopefully get a regular monthly meeting arranged by everyone involved.

It's still early days and we're looking forward to input from all the local Drupal people, but its expected that the user group will involve:

Today we are attending (as bronze sponsors) CiviCon 2011 in Chicago and the morning session was focused on where CiviCRM is today and where its going to go. As this is interesting to anyone either using CiviCRM or thinking about a CRM solution then we thought it useful to share the information.

Firstly, Kurund from the core team gave out a lot of thanks to the sponsors of the event and the core team working on CiviCRM.

Dave Greenburg, one of the co-founders then gave an update on the "State of the Union". Here are some highlights:

In 2010 the CiviCRM community grew considerably:

Consult and Design recently had the pleasure of putting the new Travelscape website live online. Established in 2007, Travelscape is a specialist travel and tourism consultancy working with private and public sector organisations, private resort owners in the UK and internationally as well as airports, airlines and travel distribution channels.

Working with Jeanne and Lesley-Ann was a real pleasure and helping the put their vision into reality was a valuable experience. They now have a completely content managed site so that they can update the content whenever they need to, ensuring that we're only needed for the technical things. We're looking forward to working further on the website in the coming months and years but there's no doubt that the new site is a solid foundation.