ID help launch a future thinking initiative for Dstl and BAE Systems

Autonomous Systems Underpinning Research (ASUR) is a Dstl programme which aims to develop an underpinning science and technology base to facilitate the research, development, production, deployment and operational use of intelligent unmanned systems by UK Armed Forces.

ID, the NorthWest's first digital agency, was the natural choice for BAE Systems for a the delivery of a business agreement platform for the initiative which streamlines the proposal submission process and helps promote the programme.

Delivered quickly and efficiently, on budget and worry-free for the client with a branding, design, build, support and hosting agreement for the life of ASUR it demonstrates how we take hassle away from busy clients who have much more to deliver. We worked closely with the client to firstly develop the brand, a holding page was then quickly put in place to get the brand out there while we worked on the website and required functionality. Working with an agency should be a pleasure - rather than a hassle.

The site is responsive to work well on mobile devices and it captures the proposal business agreements of companies wishing to take part in the programme.

It's a consortium lead project involving BAE Systems, MBDA, QinetiQ, Roke, Rolls-Royce, Selex ES and Thales all working together to satisfy the Dstl requirement to develop capabilities within the supplier base in the area of intelligent systems.

Visit the site on http://www.asur-programme.co.uk.

For more information on ID visit http://www.interactivedimension.com or call us on +44 1772 632800

Milano Pro Sport

Milano Pro Sport may not be familiar to you unless you are more than partial to a few teddy bear rolls. But Milano is one of the world’s leading companies supplying gymnastics clothes and garments, since 1991, when you buy a leotard from Milano you don’t get just get a leotard. You get a piece of sporting history hand-made with care and excellence in their factory in the UK. Clothing Olympic gymnasts such as Beth Tweddle and Lewis Smith and Britain’s Got Talent winners, Spellbound. Milano also have a cheerleading range and recently have branched out into a fun and vibrant cycling shirt range.

The huge popularity of Milano makes it one of the busiest websites Interactive Dimension look after. As long-standing clients of ID, the North West's first digital agency, they have given us the task of building, maintaining and updating their websites for the past 10 years. And excitingly this year, Milano asked us to create their brand new website for them. The third we have delivered for them.

The new website is clean, minimalist and user friendly. Clearing the way for Milano’s vibrant ranges to do the talking. Furthermore users will now be able to access Milano's ranges for their tablets or smart phones with much more ease. As the website now adapts to a variety of different platforms with it's responsive build.

Multiple social sharing platforms are also now utilised in Milano’s website so now customer can share their favourite styles and designs with friends on social media sites.

In the first week of launch the new site turned over more than half the amount the previous site had in the first two months of the financial year.

Go on have a browse through Milano Pro Sport's range and release your inner gymnast!

Bowland Fresh new site goes live!

Bowland Fresh will be a familiar brand to shoppers at Booths and Asda with their expanding range of dairy products from the heart of Bowland.

As a long standing client of Interactive Dimension, Preston's digital agency, they entrusted us to update their web presence after the current one had served them for over 7 years!

The new site promotes all their products including their recent Organic line, and will highlight their cheese and butter lines when they come to market.

Users can find out where to buy Bowland Fresh produce and retailers can get in touch to enquire about stocking their delicious goods!

As with every Wordpress based website we develop for our clients the site is 100% designed around the brand, we don't take off-the-shelf designs or templates and slap a logo on it so our clients sites all look the same. We prefer to be proud of every site we build... and with over 17 years delivering digital (we were the first digital agency in the NorthWest btw) that makes us very proud indeed!

Have a look around the site, more importantly, try some of their milk!

New site for CORDA and AMS DE-RISC

Interactive Dimension have just delivered a new website for CORDA, a BAE Systems company who offer businesses, organisations and the public sector high-level business consultancy services coupled with innovative, proven models and techniques to inform decision making.

This is the latest project we've done for BAE Systems hot on the heels of the AMS DE-RISC site we delivered last month. AMS DE-RISC is a secure portfolio site for the use of BAE Systems, Thales, Augusta Westland, GE, General Dynamics and Selex Galileo to collaborate and demonstrate their joint projects to the MoD.

ID have a long-standing relationship with BAE Systems, right from their very first website and intranet the organisation ever had, so it's great to still be working so closely with them. It's evidence of our long-term relationship building approach, and a reason why we are the longest established digital agency in the North West.

CORDA's site is based on the Wordpress platform and we worked very closely with BAE Systems security to ensure the site met their very exacting standards. This was even more critical for AMS DE-RISC as it needs to satisfy the MoD too!

You can visit the CORDA site here - http://www.corda.co.uk/

Another new site for NST

After the successful redesign and rebiuld of www.nstgroup.co.uk we've been busy working alongside NST on new projects. This time we've delivered the site for the Ireland based NST business www.nst.ie.

The site is based on the main www.nstgroup.co.uk site but delivers the specific Irish portfolio of products.

We leveraged Wordpress as a starting point, but built a lot of custom functionality and taxonomy into the system so it delivers exactly what the client wants.

And now they have two sites working together, even to the point of sharing data between certain sections of the site, whilst retaining full autonomy in other areas. Making the best use of the resource NST have to manage the sites.

Working with the client on the specification means the end result is exactly what they want, it's something we always do and time and time again it proves itself to be the best approach.

The site is extremely search engine friendly and with it's proven architecture and design (we held many usability tests with teachers when building the www.nstgroup.co.uk site) we're confident the new site will continue to help develop NST Ireland's market share.

Preston's digital agency, Interactive Dimension, are proud to work with NST Group and feel this demonstrates our relationship building approach. To us, a project is only a part of what we deliver, the more we understand you the better the results! We work alongside you to make sure its a real partnership... no attitude, just reliability and added-value all the way.

You can visit the new site here - www.nst.ie

Fancy some Vintage Cheddar?

Well... SAY CHEESE!

We've just launched a Facebook app for the exciting Vintage Guild Weekend which is scheduled for the 1st and 2nd of September (find out more here).

The application is based around a photography competition where people can browse the submitted photos and vote for the ones they like the best! Or for the more adventurous you can submit your own and try to win the amazing 'money can't buy' prize!

Whether you are browsing or entering, you can share any of the pics on Facebook or Tweet them to get as many votes as possible.

Have a look, and share the best photos! If you can do better, either with an old photo, or a new one done in a vintage style, get it uploaded, you can add as many as you want.

We worked with Preston Guild on the competition in collaboration with Huddle Media who are delivering the online PR and Wash Design who worked on the Vintage brand.

ID, Preston's digital agency, then designed and built the Facebook application in less than two weeks!

Have a look at the app here - http://goo.gl/aE8OW

Feelgood Factory & ID... the perfect partners

Last week Liverpool PCT came to see us, and by the end of the week we'd delivered our first job for their Feelgood Factory initiative. A massive project charged with revitalising the community and NHS infrastructure by improving organisation efficiencies whilst improving general health levels in the area.

The first of many (hopefully!) projects was a stand presence which was needed for this week, we took the brief, designed and produced the end result in a matter of a few days.

The next steps will be to look at ID's other services, including website design, social media strategy and search expertise to ensure messages get across and the overall campaign is digitally supported and in some cases digitally lead.

As a full service agency with a strong digital pedigree ID are the perfect partner for the NHS, one port of call for support across any channel.

Being the first digital agency in the NorthWest helps a lot, the experience gained over that time means our clients benefit from a vast amount of best practice know-how without having to engage a bulky city centre agency with overheads to match. And if they need print or exhibition services, no need to look elsewhere.

An essential ingredient... ID of course!

About 3 months ago we were contacted by Essential Cuisine, a high-quality manufacturer of stocks, jus and glace to the food industry.

Their products are used all over the UK in Michelin Star rated restaurants and the best gastro pubs.

They have a great b2b business and felt there was a market to sell to consumers so they could enjoy their amazing stock at home, when entertaining or just cooking that special dish. Foodies around the country were in for a treat!

They had to develop packaging, a business model and an eCommerce website in less than 3 months, so the team they worked with had to be capable and efficient. The Hive were contracted to look at branding and packaging, and they did a fantastic job, see below:



Essential Cuisine took care of the business model and pricing. And the product of course!

Then Preston's digital agency Interactive Dimension took on the website. It needed to be an elegant eCommerce solution which was more than 'just' a shop. Essential Cuisine wanted to become a hub of information so we developed a recipes section and a tips area where they could post fantastic recipes for their customers and give that invaluable professional chef insight on how to deliver top-class food at home.

The content needed to be as prominent as the 'shop' itself to give the right feel to the site. It was important that the site attracted users who were there for information as well as to buy stocks.

We leveraged the Worldpay payment gateway (which has it's own challenges!) and needed to integrate with the Royal Mail labeling system Essential Cuisine used already.

It's a small site in terms of products featured, but the capability is there to grow via the content management system behind it all, and as Essential Cuisine bring new products to the consumer from their fantastic food industry range the site can easily accommodate them and allow them to feature in prime spots on the site.

As well as the eCommerce site, we also developed an email newsletter for them which will be delivered using our Campaign Monitor based system, and we created their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Which is all starting to take shape. We advised on the social media strategy and empowered Essential Cuisine to take ownership of the social media rather than pay someone else to do it, which after all, is what social media is about! They're already running competitions on Facebook too!

Now it's about driving traffic to the site, Essential Cuisine already have a large user base on their food industry site, and a marketing strategy in place for the retail offering... we're supporting them with digital marketing services and are confident that the foodie community will quickly get on-board, after all, who wouldn't want to use the best stocks that up to now only the best restaurants could get hold of?

Most interestingly of all to the customers, is that Essential Cuisine's stocks work out significantly cheaper than the current gathering of 'quality' stocks you can buy in the supermarket. The equivalent amount of Truefoods chicken stock compared to £3.95 of Essential Cuisine chicken stock would cost you around £18.00, and wouldn't be as tasty or versatile either!

We think they're onto a winner, and we're glad to help make it happen.

NST Group are going places!

We've just launched a new site for NST Group, a long-standing client.

New business is amazing, but there's something to be said for a client who recognises service and capability from their existing digital agency and doesn't judge them on what they have done 4 years ago... that said, the old site was still working really well for the UK's leading school trips and tours company.

A re-brand and new product portfolio along with high SEO competition in their sector made the decision to rebuild the site an easy one, and working with their existing partner, Preston's digital agency Interactive Dimension, made it far simpler for NST Group as we already knew their business and goals.

The site is a complex matrix of tours offered on a number of different user journeys including subject and destination. And we are bringing back taxonomy driven content on the tour pages using bespoke controls we developed into the Wordpress back-end.

It's a very ambitious site to deliver in Wordpress, but we believe the core product is an ideal starting point for most sites and offers a powerful engine on which to build and tweak to meet the clients exact requirements. And Wordpress offers a really usable CMS interface which the clients love to use.

There are hundreds of products on display, clear user journeys, bespoke forms, secure areas for teacher downloads and lots of other features.

The site went live Sunday night and was attracting inquiries at 7am the next morning... So we're happy with that, and so is the client!

The next phase is integrating reviews and comments and a rigorous SEO activity to make the most of the sites well structured and search optimised code.

You can visit the site on www.nstgroup.co.uk


Following on from this release, here's some client comments:

Hi ID,

I just wanted to drop you all an email with some feedback we’ve had on the website from people in the office. It wouldn’t be fair to keep all this from you!

‘Can I just say WOW! This absolutely blows all the other school travel company websites out of the water. It’s very clear and user-friendly.’

‘Well done – it looks fantastic!!! Worth all the hard work!’

‘Nice looking site’

‘Looks great’

‘I like it - a web site that’s easy to follow’

‘Wow! It looks awesome! You must have been working so hard on this!’

‘Looks amazing – you must be really pleased (and relieved!) to see it live. Brilliant job’

Thanks for all your hard work so far.

Helen

Latest Projeqt for Staniforth

Yesterday we launched Staniforth's new website. An elegantly simple but effective site based on TBWA's Projeqt product.

It was a challenge to take the storytelling platfrom and create user journeys and website'esq content within it, but the end result is an original site which embraces an unusual approach yet feels easy to use and tells the Staniforth story well.

It's the second in a three site launch Interactive Dimension, Preston's digital agency, are involved in for Staniforth and we're looking forward to growing our strategic relationship in teh coming months.

Have a look at the site and you'll quickly grasp how to use the platform, and you can sign up for a beta account too on www.projeqt.com.

Today we will be launching their new company blog, keep your eyes peeled for that one.