Portfolio
This portfolio is being updated and is not yet comprehensive - more works and technical case studies will be available soon
KEY BENEFITS DELIVERED: Team working / collaboration enabled - Business data quickly & easily searchable - Inventory secured and backed up
The Sunseeker Crew crew placement system grew explosively in response to a massive demand for its services. The task of finding captain and crew members for luxury yacht placements worked well, but was a system of shared directories with no way of storing or searching essential metadata regarding applications (such as candidate quality or what qualifications a captain possessed). It was also heavily dependent on the knowledge and expertise of key staff members.
Patchrobe delivered a custom web based database, for the upload, storage and searching of Sunseeker Crew's inventory - the expert knowledge and working relationships developed with thousands of skilled yachting professionals.
Placing information previously lost, trapped in expert users' heads or embodied in cumbersome processes or arcane filing conventions into a common framework now allows all members of the team to engage easily in the task of searching the dataset, placing crew and generating income for the team.
Details of the technical implementation will be available in a case study shortly.
KEY BENEFITS DELIVERED: Key communication and marketing tools created - Staff empowered to maintain web presence - Rapid response to needs
As a rising star in his party, Matthew Hancock was entering the race to become MP for the constituency of West Suffolk.
His campaign team contacted Patchrobe looking for an urgent deployment - turning a web site design into a website as rapidly as possible.
This was followed by the need to apply a design in a pixel-perfect fashion to a content management system for use by the team.
Patchrobe delivered an implementation including processing of RSS feeds, user updatable interactive maps, blogging and image galleries with automated resizing, all at a level of simplicity that permits users to keep the site updated with essentially no training.
After his election Matthew's team continues to use the site as a communication tool for both him and his constituents.
SARL Dadic comprises of the management team responsible for building the foundations of the legendary Dick's Tea Bar franchise in the Alps and now focuses exclusively on operations around the infamous Dick's Sand Bar. Operations are strongly focussed on selling alcohol, entertainment and promotion of the surf lifestyle.
Strongly aware of the importance of online promotion and compelling content, the team have created archives of movies and photographs which have permitted them to dominate search engine rankings for their target market. However, eight years down the line they were faced with the prospect of staying on the cutting edge by utilising social networking get their message across but without the ability to dedicate extra time and resources to it.
Patchrobe, in addition to providing film editing and print graphic design services, was able to create a custom feed into Facebook. Now new film and movie content is automatically pushed from the site to Facebook and it is possible to create blog posts within the site that are pushed to Facebook and Twitter. SARL Dadic now have a regularly maintained page with regularly updated content within Facebook with no extra effort required and can focus on the core portions of their business without wrestling with their technology.
KEY BENEFITS DELIVERED: Business disruption minimised - Familiar business methods and processes preserved - Technical capability of online platform expanded
Sometimes organisations who require bleeding edge technology find themselves being let down by their technology partners. This was certainly the case at Method Mag. On the whole, all was well. The content management system (CMS) around which the online portion of the business was based, permitting reporters and sponsored snowboarders to file articles, blog posts and video content worked well enough to generate the advertising revenue they required.
However, the outsourced development team who had put the original site together had delivered functionality without any regard to the future. Faced with the need to perform a major upgrade to their CMS for both security and functionality needs, the current Flipmedia development team found custom features that just would not work and had no time to fix it.
Patchrobe was able to deliver a series of scripts that extracted the data set from the previous CMS, re-arranged it into a standard format and then created future-proofed content using standard modules and approved storage techniques. The site migrated and the programming team stayed on schedule with its other tasks, continuing to serve the needs of the core business.
KEY BENEFITS DELIVERED: New sales channel established - Day to day operations simplified
Profix Direct are vendors of specialist carpentry fixings. Having already chosen a combination of Drupal and Magento for their website and online sales they had already produced a solution that met the vast majority of their requirements. However, some parts of the solution didn't quite fit.
Patchrobe was able to provide customisation of the Magento code that permitted its use as a shop checkout system including bar code scanning of items. Also, using the Magento Core API, a series of scripts were created to automate and simplify the process of creating new inventory and updating stock levels.
Sunseeker Superyacht Management are a company within the Sunseeker group composed of a team distributed between Eastbourne in the UK and Antibes in south-east France.
With no dedicated technical team, the SSYM team came to Patchrobe look for a suite of collaboration, remote-working and backup tools.
We sourced, configured, delivered and installed a hardware RAID server hosting a series of SAMBA shared directories. These directories are replicated daily to a remote server in the London Docklands over an encrypted tunnel.
Also installed was a VPN server permitting remote access to the office facilities using Tunnelblick on Macs or OpenVPN client on Windows machines.
The same rsync technology used for replicating the shares was also used to backup the contents of laptop and desktop machines.
This, combined with the configuration of iPhone clients and Google's Calendar and Contact services for team working now allows all members of the company to have access to the same utilities whether they are in the UK, France or off-site at boat shows or even on the open seas via satellite internet connections, all in perfect security and with total peace of mind.
Natural World Photographer required a logo, full design and content management system that included the ability to create and update photo galleries with Paypal integration allowing customers to order and pay for printed copies of works.
Gallery Jane Griffiths required a content management system with design implemented by Flipmedia. Also provided were bulk updates to the site's inventory using the customer's own spreadsheets as the data source.