Bespoke web development and cloud software.
Keeping clients appy since 1995.
Some businesses outgrow the software they can buy. The booking system that nearly fits. The spreadsheet that runs the whole company and terrifies everyone. The membership database held together with good intentions. That's where we come in. We design and build bespoke web applications around the way you already work, then support them for as long as you run them.
We started with e-commerce in 1995, moved on to automating paper based job systems, and before long our software was helping run dozens of businesses. Today it sells festival tickets by the hundred thousand, runs national awards and looks after members for trade bodies.
Bespoke web applications and platforms.
From box office to back office.
Every application we build is different, because every business is. But most of them fall into a few families:
- Ticketing and booking systems. For events, festivals, conferences and venues, including the fiddly ones.
- Membership platforms. Members, renewals, payments and resources in one place.
- Awards and entry platforms. Online entry, judging and shortlisting, without the paper mountain.
- Bespoke e-commerce. Online shops with stock, ordering and invoicing wired in behind them.
- Job and project management tools. Planning, tracking and signing off work, built around your process rather than someone else's.
- Stock management and invoicing. Inventory, orders, deliveries and invoices that actually talk to each other.
- Customer ordering portals. Closed systems for your existing trade customers.
- Learning, CPD and recruitment platforms. Courses, training records and candidate management.
Bespoke event ticketing platform.
300,000 tickets and counting.
Manageable Ticketing is our own ticketing platform, and it's sold over 300,000 tickets so far. Shropshire Festivals run every one of their events through it: Shrewsbury Food Festival, Shropshire Oktoberfest, Shropshire Petalfields, the Shropshire Business Festival, the Shropshire Tasty Trail and Whitchurch Food & Drink Festival.
It's not a one client wonder, either. Versions of the platform also sell tickets for Ludlow Food Festival, Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre and Hawkstone Park Follies, handling up to 20,000 tickets for a single event.
It doesn't just sell tickets. It handles the fiddly extras too, from places on talks at an event, to merchandise and other add-ons. It manages the stock, runs entry on the day, and produces the kind of heavy duty reporting that keeps the accountants happy. Try getting all that from an off the shelf ticketing site without paying a fee on every ticket.
Membership website design and development.
Members, renewals, payments. Sorted.
Membership organisations tend to run on a patchwork: a website here, a payment system there, a spreadsheet of renewals somewhere in between. We bring it all into one membership platform, so members can join, pay, renew and find what they need, and your team can stop chasing.
Take the Giftware Association. We built their membership platform to handle registration, renewals and payments, alongside a big member only resources section. Members manage their own profiles and post their own news. There's even a design deposit system, so members can prove copyright in their designs.
We also built the platform behind the Giftware Association's Gift of the Year awards. We took it from a basic, functional website to an automated platform with online entry, live judging and a system that builds the shortlist brochure. It cut out a great deal of manual work, and registrations have gone up year on year since it launched.
Bespoke software development vs off the shelf.
Off the shelf fits nobody perfectly.
Off the shelf software is built for the average business. Which is fine, until you realise you're not one. You end up bending your process to fit the software, paying for features you'll never touch, and exporting spreadsheets to do the bits it can't.
Bespoke software works the other way round. We learn how you work, then build a system that does exactly that, and nothing it doesn't need to.
We'll be straight with you, though. If a £30 a month tool will do the job, we'll tell you to buy it. Bespoke is worth it when your process is your advantage, when you're drowning in workarounds, or when the software you're paying for costs more in wasted hours and fees than it saves. If that's you, keep reading.
Cloud application development.
No servers in a cupboard.
Everything we build runs in the cloud as a web application. That means it works in a browser on any device, your team can use it from the office, the festival field or the kitchen table, and there's nothing to install or update. We host it on an enterprise level platform, keep it secure and look after it, so you can get on with running the business it's running.
Bespoke ecommerce development.
For shops that aren't off the shelf.
Some shops are simple. Plenty aren't. Collector's editions in three formats. Bespoke pricing for different customer accounts. Customers who need steering to exactly the right product. Stock, ordering and invoicing that should just happen behind the scenes. That's where template platforms start to creak, and where we come in.
Template shops also look cheap until you add the apps. Every extra feature is another monthly subscription, and they mount up fast. When we built Islabikes a bespoke platform, we saved them £300 a month in Shopify app subscriptions alone.
Islabikes are the legendary name in children's bikes, and choosing the right replacement part for a child's bike is anything but simple. So we built their shop around a step by step process that guides customers to exactly the right part. Parts sales went up 30% after launch.
A Way With Media are publishers and event organisers, and their books are collector's pieces: signed, boxed, numbered and limited editions, often in several formats of the same title. We built the website that promotes and sells them, from music memoirs by John Lydon, Shaun Ryder, Toyah Willcox and Stewart Copeland to cookbooks from chefs like Gareth Ward, Adam Handling and Tom Kitchin.
How we develop bespoke web applications.
Your process first.
Code second.
- We listen. How you work now, what's slowing you down, and what good looks like.
- We map. The processes, the people and the data, before a line of code gets written.
- We design. The user experience, screen by screen, so it's simple for the people who'll use it every day.
- We build. In stages, with you testing as we go.
- We train. Your team, until they're comfortable, not just until we've handed over.
- We support. For the lifetime of the application, from bug fixes to new features as you grow.
Custom web application development on our own framework.
No plugins.
No passengers.
We're real developers with decades of experience writing our own code. We don't bolt your system together from third party plugins that might break at the next update. And while there's no shortage of tools promising to write code for you, thirty years of judgement isn't something you can generate. Our applications are built on Manageable, our own development framework and content management system, which means we have complete control over it, fix things fast, and never wait on someone else's patch.
Talk to a bespoke software development team.
Got a process that's driving you mad?
Tell us about it. We'll tell you honestly whether it needs bespoke software, whether something off the shelf would do, and roughly what it would take. We're based in Shropshire and build for businesses right across the UK.