A fresh look and great usability

Phoenix Sports Club came with an open ended 'we just want to refresh our website'. We quickly identified that as well as the visual components of the website, the whole process of using and maintaining the club's information online would benefit from a bit of energizing.

Our aim was to make the site a regular point of contact for all members of the club - not just somewhere to visit if you were thinking of joining up.

Previously a mechanism had been developed to capture and share information about players and matches - but it was rarely used and left those all too embarrassing 'coming soon' notices all over the place. Our solution was to streamline and simplify the process of listing and updating matches - we used the Google Maps API to locate matches physically based on plain English address data being entered and used some intelligent enhancements to predict the most likely data entries to speed up the process.

Enhancing engagement away from the website was achieved by establishing a Twitter feed for the club, pulling data from the feed onto the homepage created another area of dynamic content.

Visually, the site is clean, smart and vibrant - capturing some of the energy and enthusiasm of the club's managers, players and supporters.

Let eBay take the strain.

Love your loft....again is a great company, an eclectic treasure trove of constantly changing curios.

The company offers two distinct services to two distinct groups of users with opposing needs: customers of the store and users of the de-cluttering service - who are also potential stock-suppliers.

While the content dealing with the de-clutter service would remain static, the store would be highly dynamic, at times changing on a daily basis. Our solution to this potential content-management mayhem is to let eBay deal with it!

Using the eBay API, a PHP / Javascript framework was built to extract the store's stock listing and present it in Love your loft....again's own website.

Love your loft....again is such a simple but brilliant concept - we knew it would scale and so we build in scalability at every stage. A toolset for mining eBay sales data helps Love your loft...again target specific stock and provide a better service to its 'de-clutter' clients.

By scaling up our approach to the business, we're using the example of the online giants to secure Love your loft....again's place at the front of a growing marketplace. By employing data mining techniques and observing user behaviour on-site we can harness the highly dynamic nature of the store and enable it to respond to customer requests. The store can transform from clothes to toys, to collectables and back again in a very short space of time, all led by customer demand.

Development of simple processes has established a personalised store for every customer generating valuable data that influences future stock purchasing. These techniques are very rarely seen in a business as young as Love your loft....again - and for no good reason - finding out what your customers want you to sell them seems like a great idea to me!

A sustainable, user-friendly and highly visual data analyser

A low-cost, distributed, portable, maintenance free, bespoke data management application built using a familiar toolset. Impossible, surely? Er, no!

The Pupil Data Tracker is WeAreNotMachines' answer to the familiar problem of the one-size-fits-all, clunky and error prone data tracking spreadsheet. Data trackers built with Excel probably exist in just about every school, alongside over-complex analysis tools buried in the MIS system and any number of .NET framework applications bought from enthusiastic amateurs. Taking on this challenge I sought to make usability and sustainability the key factors - teachers just don't have the time or expertise to manage a complex spreadsheet so a solution was needed that validated all input, locked down everything that didn't need to be altered and that could convey rich information at a glance as well as on closer inspection.

The tracker is based around a visualisation dashboard that provides comprehensive and clear graphs, charts and models of pupil attainment and statistical data. Pupil data is entered on an overview sheet and copied through onto all other sheets - there's no chance of adding or removing a pupil and messing up the stats somewhere else. Data entry is fully validated so the calculations are always consistent and data can only be entered at a single point - if you're working with FSP data you can only enter it on the FSP sheet, KS1 on the KS1 sheet - makes sense, right? Spreadsheets are built per cohort - there's no need to archive or copy and paste last year's Year 3 into this year's Year 4. What's more, historical data is preserved - pupils are not remved but are taken off roll to exclude them from calculations enabling a simple, single click 'what if..?' scenario tool.

A range of visualisation techniques are employed to give at-a-glance information about cohorts - cell colouring describes attainment above at or below local and national levels, totalling, summary and cube operations divide the data set into logical chunks that give you quick and dependable answers to the questions so often asked by governors, inspectors and local authority colleagues.

Clear and simple graphs show the 'shape' of the cohort's progress in Reading, Writing and Maths as a complete cohort and separated and compared by contextual statistical factors such as Gender or SEN. These concise visualisations provide a deep insight into the 'story' of not only each cohort, but of your school.

Your school targets and thresholds will be unique to your current action plan so every installation is fully customised to your needs. Simple, powerful, effective and superb value - request a demo or more information.

Clear communication with a vibrant personality

If you do something well you need to tell people - you need to grab their attention and show them just how brilliant you are. That's what we did for St Margaret's Lee. You can do so much with a school website - your school is the hub of you community - so why do so many people use it just to talk to people who might join it?

St Margaret's Lee is a successful, thriving, London primary school. Its community is active and has a lot to share and so it needed a toolset that let it share lots of things as quickly and as easily as possible. WeAreNotMachines developed a school website framework of tools for sharing photos, events, contact details and documents, safely, easily and securely.

Different members of the school community are able to share content - from pupils and parents to teachers and governors. The school has really championed its website as a central, accessible and environmentally friendly mechanism for communication. As well as weekly newsletters by email, the school shares much of its text-based information: policies, communications, bulletins, learning resources and web-links online as well as via a subscription email service. This attitude of openness and sharing is a great means of further uniting this close and supportive community and is generating very positive relationships between school and home.

Friendly and welcoming can be smart and professional

Holy Cross gives you the warmest welcome you can imagine - its such a friendly and happy place to learn - it needed a website to match.

Built using the same website framework as for St Margarets Lee, the website built for Holy Cross was designed with a look and feel that conveyed its attitude of openness and inclusion with the smartness and sense of purpose that has made it so successful a school.

Communication tools are clear and simple to use - the school has moved many of its paper based administrative tasks such as calendaring and document sharing to its website. Its a busy school and the website has made it very easy to share the children's achievements with the world through galleries and blog-style rolling news services. Email subscription services were built to enable sharing of newsletters and other documents amongst staff, governors and the wider school community.

Simple elegance for a classy performer

We didn't want cliché, we didn't want smokey jazz-club, we didn't want reams of text. Melody's a performer, you need to see her and you need to hear her sing! So that's what we did.

Melody is a cabaret performer with a fantastic, sophisticated and sensitive voice (you really must hear it). We wanted to build a website that would showcase her performance whilst allowing her act (the product) to grow and change independently. Simple, elegant styling in a restrained palette with design features that nod to elements of styles contemporary to the songs she performs let Melody be the focus of your visit to her site.

The site was WeAreNotMachines' first foray into HTML5 with device aware pages serving the jukebox and gallery in either Flash or browser native HTML5 components as required.

Letting the product speak for itself