Consult and Design

Last week Adam Hill and Nathan Lawson headed south for the third, and sadly final, New Adventures in Web Design conference, held at the magnificent Albert Hall in Nottingham.

The single-track conference consisted of nine brilliant talks, each of which left us with plenty of food for thought on our own approach towards designing for the web. Here’s a brief summary of some of our favourites!

From everyone here at Consult and Design International, we would like to send all our clients, colleagues and friends our best wishes for the festive period.

2012 has been a milestone year for us. Not only did we move to our brand new studio, The Hayloft, we also recruited two new developers to our team. Thanks to this period of growth, we head into the New Year with the confidence that we will be producing even more great work for our clients in 2013.

After a busy end to the year, we're really looking forward to our office Christmas party with the guys from Wonder Stuff Studio later this week, as well as finding out what everyone got one another in Secret Santa! I'm hoping for a new pair of socks...

In our previous blog post, we briefly mentioned that we had a new staff member joining the team here at Consult and Design. Nathan Lawson joins us as our new Junior Front-End Developer through University of Sunderland's Graduate Internship Programme.

Nathan graduated from Sunderland earlier this summer, and has now been working with us at The Hayloft for a couple of weeks. During this time we have expanded Nathan's existing skillset through a number of Drupal training courses, delivered by our own team here at Consult and Design.

This week we moved into our new studio, The Hayloft, and we love it. A minute's walk from Gosforth High Street, we now have four members of our staff located in a stylish new home that we share with our great friends at Wonder Stuff Studio. This is a fantastic new development for us, and necessary after the growth of our team with the addition of Nathan Lawson, our new Junior Front-End Developer.

So if you're in the area and fancy a cup of coffee (we do REALLY good coffee!) and a chat, then feel welcome to drop by! The address is 10A Back West Avenue and the postcode NE3 4ES.

Consult and Design are VERY proud to be a founding Supporting Partner of the Drupal Association - continuing our commitment to the development of the leading Content Management System.

Supporting Partners are businesses who financially support the Drupal Association's key community initiatives that help Drupal thrive and grow. One such initiative was the recent sprint that upgraded Drupal.org to Drupal 7.

We are proud to work alongside these participating partners to support and grow the Drupal community and project. Current partners include Microsoft, Lullabot and Acquia representing some of the leading companies in the world of Drupal.

Tyneside based web development company. Consult and Design have launched a new web site for North East Organic Growers (NEOG), a co-operative growing organic vegetables on their twelve-acre site in Northumberland.

The new website is built using Drupal Content Management System to give staff total control over the content that appears on the site. Its clean, green design reflects the brand values of NEOG which has been providing North East consumers with healthy, vital, fresh organic produce since 1995.

Phil of NEOG said “ We are really pleased with the new site. Consult and Design worked with us to make sure it did everything we needed with a tight budget.”

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.

There are many high quality and innovative Content Management Systems out there, and we've tried many of them both in testing and in production. However after years of this, there is one framework that we seem to come back to time and time again.

Consult and Design International build web applications on Drupal software which has a significant impact on the success, usability and security of the platforms we create. Drupal is a powerful, quickly-changing and adaptable platform that provides enhanced integration and a fast evolution.

Our website had for sometime lay un-touched as we pondered over the way to take it into the future. Today sees the launch of our new look, new feel and a number of new features.

A Fresh New Set of Clothes
We’ve gone for a simple look for the site, using easy navigation and keeping content to “quality, not quantity”. We believe most of what we can say to our customers is best said face to face, or at least ear to ear so our focus has been to promote customers to contact us, rather than supplying endless amounts of waffle or detailed information. Our corporate colours remain the same, but we’ve also concentrated on there being lots of white space, and room to breathe.

Drupal Content Management

This week saw the launch of the rebranding of the Anna Lindh Foundation’s “1001 Actions for Dialogue” website – one of Consult and Design’s major projects of 2008. The rebranding to "Dialogue in Action" comes after the highly successful project comes to an end, however the team at the Foundation wanted to keep the website alive due to its huge amount of returning visitors and registered users.