We're incredibly proud of the end result, particularly some of the creative flourishes we added to bring the site to life such as custom SVG frames for stylised images and the floating parallax bubbles that move up and down the page as the user scrolls.

Following the successful launch we're already planning new phases of work to evolve and enhance the site to add new and exciting features to it and we can't wait to see how the site develops in the years ahead.

Why not take a look at the finished site yourself and if you're considering a similar project, we'd love to hear from you.

We couldn't be happier with the finished website, being particularly proud of the subtle but effective use of the brand elements and typography as well as the overall editorial feel of the main projects, services and sectors areas of the site not to mention the engaging use of video on the site's homepage that sets the scene as soon as visitors arrive on the site.

Why not take a look at the finished site yourself and if you're considering a similar project, we'd love to hear from you.

We've thoroughly enjoyed working with the team at Escape Entertainment, their input was essential in the success of the overall project, and we're really proud to see our work making a real difference to the business on a day-to-day basis and across multiple teams, from the staff handling bookings to the marketing and promotions team driving traffic to the site.

With the site now live we're already discussing and scheduling additional projects to enhance the Offers area of the site in time for the Christmas party bookings rush as well as designing and delivering a batch of social media marketing graphics and a Mailchimp template for email marketing.

Why not take a look at the finished site yourself and if you're considering a similar project, we'd love to hear from you.

The project wasn't without its challenges but throughout the development lifecycle we worked in close collaboration with the client and worked incredibly hard to meet their exact requirements or make suggestions where we felt improvements or adjustments could be made.

We're really pleased with the finished site and are already looking forward to working with the client to evolve and enhance the site for them and their customers in the years ahead.

Why not take a look at the finished site yourself and if you're considering a similar project, we'd love to hear from you.

We've really enjoyed working with the technical and marketing staff at Total Travel Protection, part of the Ancile Insurance Group of companies, and we're already looking forward to enhancing and evolving the site in the years ahead and seeing how the site helps to make a success of this brand new insurance business.

Why not take a look at the finished site yourself and if you're considering a similar project, we'd love to hear from you.

IYA took the lead with the website design task, working with the client to produce a variety of page layouts. Once the designs had been approved we began work on the development phase, building the content blocks and page layouts in Craft CMS ready to be populated with content.

We'd initially planned a two-phase delivery schedule but we were able to complete both phases for the initial launch, much to the delight of the client.

We're really happy with the finished website and we're looking forward to building more features and functionality into it on the solid foundation that Craft CMS provides.

Why not take a look at the finished site yourself and if you're considering a similar project, we'd love to hear from you.

At the outset of the project, we were involved in weekly meetings to see how the designs were taking shape and add our own input in relation to the development process to come and answer any Craft CMS related questions raised.

Once the design process had completed and we had a full set of approved designs we got underway with the Craft CMS development work, building out the various content blocks and components in a modular style to create the various page templates in a flexible form, allowing blocks to be added and removed from pages whenever necessary.

During the development phase we continually test our work with a variety of tools to make sure we are catching any issues before they become serious problems and also to ensure we're hitting our benchmark targets for the site in terms of performance, SEO, security and mobile optimisation. As you can see from the image, we're hitting top marks across the board!

We're really pleased with the finished site, it's easy to update for staff and easy to navigate for users and it looks stunning - providing a fitting home for the premium TV and advertising work Wonderhood Studios are known for.

Why not take a look at the finished site yourself and if you're considering a similar project, we'd love to hear from you.

Gina joins the company as our new Admin Assistant / PA to the MD. She brings with her a wealth of experience having spent over 20 years working in similar roles in the City of London so there's not much she hasn't seen or done in her career.

Day-to-day, Gina is responsible for a number of tasks that all keep the business ticking over so things like invoicing, staff timesheets, annual leave requests, organising meetings, managing the MD's inbox and telephone and all the other behind the scenes tasks that are key to the smooth running of the company.

Outside of work, Gina is mum to a very lively five year old boy and enjoys reading, keeping fit and travelling to exotic destinations.

Jordan comes into the team fresh from completing his Computer Science degree at the University of Plymouth. He also joins the back-end team in a Junior role with a focus on PHP development.

Jordan has already been involved in a number of active projects and has shown a keen interest in getting to grips with the frameworks and platforms we use and has made valuable contributions to a number of projects.

In his spare time Jordan enjoys gaming and furthering his knowledge by developing his own pet-projects.

To find out more about Gina and Jordan take a look at their profiles in our meet the team section.

Ken Judge & Associates approached us with a need to replace their existing website that had reached the end of its useful life and was in need of upgrading.

We pitched a variety of options and solutions and it was decided that, because there was no need for a content management system (CMS), we could build the site as a static project. The only downside to that approach is that any content edits are handled by us but if a site doesn't require a high volume of editing it's a wise choice to make.

The new site was designed to incorporate the businesses new logo and branding as well as a complementary new font. Behind the scenes, the site runs on Gatsby and this was one of the first projects in which we were able to use and test its capabilities in the wild.

We're really pleased with the finished Ken Judge & Associates website and If you're considering a similar project feel free to get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.

We've been working with the team at Provectus Remediation since 2008 and so it was great to be invited to design and develop the website for their latest business, Provectus Soils Management.

The staff at Provectus Soils Management had a very clear idea of what they wanted from the new site, both in terms of appearance and functionality. SEO was critical, being a new a business starting with no existing online presence, and also the ability of the site to drive visitors to the "Get a quote" page and encourage them to get in touch.

The site is built on Craft CMS 3, which has proven to be a great platform for content editors as well as for us as developers and maintainers of the site. To assist with the SEO of the site we integrated the SEOmatic plugin which we're finding to be an excellent addition to our projects and gives our clients the granular, per-page control they need as well as useful cross-site insights via the main dashboard.

The finished Provectus Soils Management website was designed, developed and launch on time and within budget and we're excited to see how it grows over time and looking forward to being involved in its evolution. If you're considering a similar project feel free to get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.

View the source data at Google Trends

Certainly here at Enovate we select Laravel for many new web application development projects thanks to its wide-adoption and friendly developer-experience. Like many web agencies of our size we use both Craft CMS and Laravel in our projects and from time-to-time both. Our developers certainly feel more comfortable and productive working with Laravel and seldom speak with any praise or enthusiasm about the Yii Framework. The two frameworks take a different approach to developer-experience and we often find ourselves wishing we had features available in Yii that exist in Laravel and the same cannot be said in reverse.

So it was with much excitement when I heard, at the recent online London Craft CMS Meetup we organise, John Morton (curator of Craft Link List) mentioned that Brandon Kelly had raised the topic of Craft CMS switching from Yii to Laravel in a future version on the Craft CMS community Discord (#extending-craft, 21st August 2020):

This is really exciting news, the sort of news that draws out the very best animated GIFs when shared with (remote) working colleagues! Think Carlton dance levels of sheer unbridled joy!

Whilst Yii has proven to be a safe and stable foundation for Craft CMS up to now, it’s definitely become apparent that Laravel is where the PHP community has moved and has the potential to provide a fantastic foundation for Craft CMS going forward.

Those of us who have been part of the Craft CMS journey since we got our hands on version 1 back in 2013 are probably recoiling in horror at the prospect of another Craft version 3 type upgrade / migration. I am too, but Brandon was swift to back up his comments with some reassurances around making the transition for developers and our clients as smooth and pain-free as possible:

That said, I think realistically a change of this magnitude is always going to be accompanied by a few bumps but to hear that commitment from Brandon Kelly to keep those as minimal as possible was good enough for me. I think we all understand that, in choosing Craft, a modern CMS that is committed to staying that way, an element of upkeep comes with the territory. Personally, I fail to see how this transition could be accomplished without some degree of pain for us developers but the prize (being on Laravel) would motivate us to do so much more than moving to Yii version 3 ever could.

In my opinion switching to Laravel makes great business sense for Craft. Being able to introduce the large Laravel community to such a polished CMS as Craft will be transformative both for Craft CMS as a business and potentially for us Craft CMS Partners and the developers who work with Craft CMS day-to-day.

Furthermore, it would be great for our developers to feel equally at home when moving from our pure web application projects built upon Laravel to our Craft CMS projects. In addition, the potential for code reuse along with tooling such as test frameworks, CI, and deployment approaches would be a massive time-saver and benefit to us as a company.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say that a move to Laravel Framework from Yii could be the most transformative change Craft CMS has undergone since its debut in 2013.

Let’s do this Craftisans!

With me so far? OK. That all seems quite simple, right? It's even a bit like having files saved in an online storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive so you can get to them from anywhere. But we're just scratching the surface because hosting is linked to one critical factor that determines the success of your website and your return on investment and that's: performance.

We've all been to a website that's slow to load and we all do the same thing: leave and try another site in the hope that it's faster. But think about that for a moment, the site you left is someone's corporate website, a project they might well have invested countless hours of work into and thousands of pounds of investment and you spent a matter of seconds waiting for it to load before heading elsewhere. Now, consider your own website ... does your website download quickly? If the honest answer is no then you're not only losing money and clients you're investing time and effort into a website that visitors are turning their backs on simply because its performance isn't good enough. And that's why your hosting setup is critical.

So a 0.1 second improvement in load time resulted in converting 8% more retail consumers and combined, those consumers spent 10% more money. Just 0.1 seconds!? That's mind-blowing. And yet that's precisely why we've invested thousands of hours into our own web hosting architecture at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and taken the time to become AWS certified solutions architects. Finding these tiny improvements in performance seems trivial but 0.1 seconds really is significant, the figures don't lie, and they can make the difference between hitting your sales targets or having your best ever quarter or falling short.

A similar study, carried out by BCG and Ryte, The Real Cost of Poor Website Quality, had similar eye-opening findings:

So if you invested £10,000 in your shiny new website but failed to commission an agency that cares about hosting you'd ultimately be wasting £1,000. Can any business afford to do that?

Now don't get me wrong, well-configured hosting isn't a panacea that'll solve all your website's problems, there's also caching to consider, file compression, code minification, and lot's more but the point is that any agency that cares about web hosting will already be aware of these things and actively ensuring they're baked into their projects, just like we do here at Enovate.

So, to wrap-up, don't underestimate the importance of web hosting to the success of your website and your investment in it and if you want to speak to a company that will happily talk for days (or ten minutes if you'd prefer) about why we are passionate about website hosting or you want to discuss why your website isn't performing the way you want it to just give us a call.

Cyber Essentials aims to help organisations implement basic levels of protection against cyber attack, demonstrating to their customers that they take cyber security seriously.

The scheme is available at two levels and we've achieved the first level, Cyber Essentials, which is described as:

The accreditation is further described as:

We're proud to have become a Cyber Essentials accredited company because we understand how important security is and we wanted to demonstrate that to our clients by achieving an official accreditation from an external, government recognised body.