Clients
Teachers TV is a UK-based free-to-air television channel aimed at people working in education. The channel is funded by the Department for Education and Skills and operated by Education Digital, a consortium of Brook Lapping Productions, ITV and the Institute of Education. The Teachers' TV website makes most of the channel's programmes available to view online or download. As of March 2008 Teachers' TV offers 2,000 programmes to 150,000 registered users, averaging over 1 million visits per month.
Version 1.0 of the Teachers TV website was launched in February 2005. As the site grew, it proved difficult to navigate and began to struggle under increasing load. By the middle of 2006 a new solution was needed. Teachers TV, through Victoria Real, chose Efurbishment to implement a Drupal-based CMS solution. By mid-October the migration was complete on schedule and the site was relaunched with minimal disruption to 45,000 users. Three months after relaunch the site had gained an additional 35,000 users, with traffic up 50% on the previous year.
With Efurbishment help, the Teachers TV website won first prize in the web division of the 2007 Japan Prize. The Teachers TV website won the 'Best Public Sector Service' at the 2006 Revolution Magazine Awards. The Teachers TV website won highly commended in the Government and Information category of the 2006 BIMAs (British Interactive Media Association awards), and highly commended at the 2006 Japan Prize.
Note: Teachers TV re-branded in March 2007, but the underlying Drupal platform remains the same.
Careershifters.org is an online community for anyone thinking about or making a career change. Careershifters.org, built on Drupal, was launched in December 2006. Careershifters features ‘shift doctors’ (agony aunts for career changers), articles, columns written by career coaches, ‘shift logs’ (real-life diaries of career change), an enterprise blog, comments, tagging and RSS feeds. As of April 2007 Careershifters has 1000 registered users.
In February of 2006 UnLtd contracted Efurbishment to build community features into their existing website. UnLtd is a charity that supports social entrepreneurs. UnLtd wanted to encourage their award winners to write about their daily lives, offering personal insights into their projects, the challenges that they face. UnLtd wanted to create a forum for award winners to discuss issues arising from their projects.
UnLtd Blogs is built on Drupal. It features single and multi-user blogs, comments, per blog moderation, tagging and RSS feeds.
DNA contracted Efurbishment to develop complex Apache Cocoon-based quote and application solutions for Standard Life Health and Standard Life Bank. These solutions required the implementation of complex business logic eliciting information from customers, ideally concluding in a sale of and insurance or banking product. These solutions make extensive use of Cocoon, in particular its revolutionary ‘Flow’ layer. Flow simplifies the implementation of complex business logic. Efurbishment implemented DNA’s in-house knowledge management system using Drupal, and introduced CruiseControl-based continuous integration processes into DNA’s development effort.
Prophono is a London-based choir formed in mid-2004. Prophono was looking to use the web to better communicate with its membership and audience. A members-only area allows people to organise rehearsals, send apologies, vote on repertoire and generally participate in the running of the choir. For an organisation with little or no advertising budget this website also provides an avenue for communicating with a potential audience. Efurbishment was also responsible for the web design, HTML and CSS implementation.
The The New Zealand Opera Society wanted to create an online community providing "New Zealand's opera lovers — both at home and overseas — with the means to share their views with a wider community: reviewing performances, debating issues, or simply discussing opera." Drupal has proven the ideal solution for their needs and a community has grown up around the blogging, commenting and polling features that the open-source Drupal provides. Efurbishment was also responsible for the web design, HTML and CSS implementation.
Rocket-Media.Net Ltd is a small media services company specialising in hosted content management solutions. Rocket-Media.Net’s clients are typically small companies who rely on Rocket-Media.Net to provide continuous and reliable web and email hosting. Rocket-Media.Net needed to replace their costly and spam-vulnerable Exchange-based email infrastructure. Read more about Efurbishment’s email server solution here.
Efurbishment implemented Apache Cocoon based dynamic Adobe PDF file generation. Existing content-managed information is dynamically transformed into PDF content ranging from corporate brochures to bar menus and wine lists.
Efurbishment also provided technical consultancy and implementation services to Rocket-Media Ltd as they re-implemented RUDI (the Resource for Urban Design Information) using Drupal. RUDI offers over 5000 pages and images to its large subscription only user base.
Energy Intellect Ltd provides Internet-based services to the energy industry. These services include automated meter reading, online presentation of energy usage data, and managed B2B transactions with international energy market systems.
From 1999 until 2004 Mark Leicester was Technical Lead of the half-dozen developers responsible for developing iE2, Energy Intellect's flagship enterprise scale web application.
After leaving to form Efurbishment in 2004, Mark continued to provide Energy Intellect with specialist consultation regarding continuous integration (CruiseControl, ANT build scripts etc.), and automated web site testing (with jWebUnit).
