Showcase

Discovering WWI ancestors at Landscore

Rising to the challenge: “Can we discover our WW1 ancestors?”

Keying in to the WWI centenary, Landscore Primary School set themselves a challenge: “Can we discover our WW1 ancestors?” and Brighter Working replied with a resounding: YES!

We're helping 90 children (in Years 5 & 6) to discover and explore the lives of their ancestors around the time of WWI, to assess the impact of the First World War and identify some of the key differences between life then and now.

This is all about making history come alive! By setting the context around the lives of their own ancestors, children (and their families) are directly engaged in the history of the period, making it very real and relevant to them. Whilst each individual child has a slightly different perspective according to their ancestral history, group work draws out common themes and provides a rich learning experience.

Crediton Area History & Museum Society

An online catalogue of Crediton's historic documents.

Let's Get Fundraising

The latest Community Inspired website.

On your bike!

The Boniface Trail Group wanted to produce a local guide aiming to put Crediton firmly on the cycling map ...

We helped them design an eye-catching leaflet containing a street map and four mini-maps showing recommended cycle routes to explore the local countryside.

Sidmouth Science Festival

From iWeb site to a Brighter website!

The idea of the Sidmouth Science Festival was born in 2011 with the first festival taking place in October 2012. At the beginning we were not sure how the Festival would work out nor were we sure of whether it would ever be repeated.  As a result, our original website was put together in haste by volunteers on a shoestring budget and with the most basic functions and design.  

It was clear, however, that a lot more would be required of a website, which would do the Festival justice in future years, and here was where Brighter Working came in. They designed the new site, implemented it, gave us our new logo and helped us think through what was needed with a practical flair, which does them credit. It would be hard to find someone as responsive as this company.

We are now proud of our new site, which has flair, is easy to maintain, is clear and well put together and fulfils its purpose so well.

Sidmouth Science Festival

Under the bonnet: MSSQL, .Net, CSS, Umbraco, XSLT, XHTML, JQuery, content management

Vision Group for Sidmouth

An emergency migration from Drupal, new functionality and complete re-design in just one week ...

... without compromising on quality!

The Vision Group for Sidmouth was founded in 2005 to provide a focus and forum for local people to put forward their ideas about the future of the town and valley as well work with the local government bodies on the plans.  Over the years the group outgrew the initial website and also found itself in need of updating the technology.  We wanted to have a modern website, with easy navigation and clear structure as well as easy maintenance and a good look.  We also wanted to automate our newsletters if possible to save on time to produce it and costs of sending it out. The fact that the organisation is entirely run by volunteers means that we need to minimise the effort of maintaining the site but maximise its impact.

We were fortunate to find in Brighter Working a company who were professional, enthusiastic, good listeners and providers of neat implementable ideas to take this project on.  We all appreciate their fantastic helpfulness, their patience in explaining the technical choices to us in everyday language and their design talent in creating the new site, migrating the old content to the new site and implementing everything in record time with the minimum of fuss on our part.  The job was made more challenging for Brighter Working because our old site 'broke' suddenly and could not be repaired without major effort. This meant that the timescales were suddenly shifted from a more leisurely approach to emergency mode!

The result is a good looking site, which works well and more than fulfils our needs.

Vision Group for Sidmouth

Under the bonnet: MSSQL, .Net, CSS, Umbraco, XSLT, XHTML, JQuery, content management

Sustainable Crediton

A collaborative community website

Sustainable Crediton was established in 2007 and after five years their website had outgrown its original structure and was becoming increasingly difficult for visitors to navigate and hard for their webmaster to maintain the myriad of pages and links.

Brighter Working migrated their plain old HTML site into a content management system, provided them with an extensible and dynamic structure (which automatically prioritises the most recent items) and gave the look and feel a much-needed facelift. We also back-filled the system from an assortment of papers collected over the years so that they now have a complete online archive of their organisational history. To-date the website has over 1,500 pages of content detailing the meetings, events, campaigns and articles since their formation.

The website is now maintained collectively by volunteers within the organisation, ensuring that it stays fresh, with the minimum amout of effort. An up-to-date newsletter can be generated and sent to subscribers virtually at the press of a button.

Under the bonnet: MSSQL, .Net, CSS, Umbraco, XSLT, XHTML, JQuery, SSL, content management

PTA+

A knowledge management system for parent teacher associations nationwide, enabling members to collaborate and take advantage of supplier offers.

The PTA+ website helps parent teacher associations. It provides a place for the committee to store information so that it is available in later years rather than in a retired members desk drawer. It allows the PTA to track membership, to email parents and to share information with other PTAs.

There is a large directory of suppliers who can provide equipment for schools or to help in fundraising. There are how-to guides to help the committee organise events and information sheets to cover legal and practical matters. Suppliers also provide parent perks which are special offers available only to parents who use PTA+.

Each of the 30,000 PTAs around the UK is also provided with a mini-site. This is a simple web site that allows them to announce events and publicise the latest news about their PTA.

Under the bonnet: java, tomcat, XML, MySQL, MSSQL, .Net, CSS, Umbraco, struts, SAML, Spring, CAS, SOAP, REST, XSLT, SEO, XHTML, JQuery, SSL, content management

Bradley Stoke Physio

A typical small business web-site

Bradley Stoke Physio found themselves in a position shared by many small businesses ... they had a simple but visually appealing website with good graphics and some tasteful animations but it didn't appear to be bringing in any new business. Furthermore, the original developer had moved on, leaving them with no way of changing it.

Brighter Working were asked to advise on the best way to market themselves better on the web with a view to advertising in a cost effective way.

On reviewing their website it was evident that the design, whilst visually appealing, was not optimised in a way which would enable people to find it in the first place. So, rather than recommend (expensive) advertising, we re-worked their website to make it "search-engine friendly" whilst retaining the well-branded look & feel. We also provided guidance on making the most of free resources on the web.

As a result, their hit rate more than doubled, eliminating the need to invest in web-advertising.

Under the bonnet: HTML, CSS, Javascript

School Trips Plus

A messaging service for school trips & emergencies

The School Trips Plus web site helps schools plan and approve school trips by sharing risk analyses and information about venues. Once the trip is underway, it provides an emergency "call all the teachers on the trip" service for if children go missing or just for coordination. The service also gives schools an easy way to distribute information to parents so they can find out where to meet up, how the trip is going or if it is running late. It has also been used in very inventive ways by teachers. In once case for an entire skiing trip to sing for their parents. The web site provides this service for nearly 60,000 schools in the UK.

The system experienced very heavy load in 2011. Schools realised they could use the system to provide information to parents about snow closures. Brighter Working made a very rapid series of upgrades and improvements to allow the web site and phone service to cope. The improved service now handles up to 250,000 calls an hour from parents trying to find out if their school is closed in bad weather. These calls often came in very small bursts such as after radio announcements on the morning news but the system maintains a speedy response throughout.

Under the bonnet: java, load balancing, tomcat, IVR, messaging, XML, MySQL, HTML, Javascript, SSL

FamilySafePlus+

E-Commerce - a simple on-line shop

FamilySafePlus+ wanted to sell their range of products on-line but were unsure which e-commerce package would be best for them.

Brighter Working helped them identify their detailed requirements for:

• stock control
• catalogue management
• pricing levels
• discounts and special offers

We evaluated a range of appropriate products and then installed and customised their selected package to integrate with their existing site and branding.

As PCI-DSS regulations came into force, Brighter Working assisted with attaining PCI-DSS approval for the web site ensuring that data protection and security requirements for credit card transactions were all exceeded.

Under the bonnet: java, MySQL, CSS, XHTML, Javascript, PHP, X-Cart, e-commerce

Child Safe Zones

A secure system for raising alerts for missing children

Child Safe Zones helps to re-unite missing children with their parents. It provides a service to shopping centres and organisations (including several town centres) with contact points in case of a missing child. It enables approved security staff or police to receive a notification of a missing child on their mobile phone complete with photograph and necessary information (such as medical emergency data).

The site also lets parents enter information about their children (or vulnerable adults) before they go on holiday. If a child is lost a missing poster in the local language can be produced very quickly ensuring that action can be taken promptly and helping the parents communicate with local authorities.

Due to the information held, the web site and servers comply with the highest levels of security. Child Safe Zones have worked with FirstChoice holidays and the Autism society to help reassure parents travelling both in the UK and abroad.

Under the bonnet: java, messaging, HTML, CSS, Javascript, SSL

EQProfits

An everquest fan site

For all players of Everquest this web site provides the kind of data mining capabilities that major corporations use to analyse buying and selling patterns. Members combine data collected automatically while playing the game to work out which are the best things to buy and sell in Everquests virtual economy. The site works on a subscription basis and has customers on every continent.

Under the bonnet: MSSQL, .Net, CSS, Javascript

Tibboh

A child-friendly mobile internet - using a dongle to enable parents and teachers to control where their children roamed on the web.

Tibboh is a complex infrastructure project designed to provide age rated mobile internet access for children and vulnerable adults. It uses the same categorisation used by the BBFC for film certification (U, PG, 12, 15, 18) to classify every web site on the internet and in some cases specific pages on web sites and disallow access to children who are underage.

The system is unusual in that there is no software on the phone or PC and several people in one home can login and get different age categorisations. So, a youngster can be prevented from watching adult content on his PC or iPad while mum and dad can still download the latest horror films from their bedroom. All of the age categorisation is based on the childs recorded age provided by their school or parent.

Under the bonnet: java, load balancing, tomcat, SQUID servers, authentication