Total Politics - www.totalpolitics.com

Brief – To create a website to accompany the new release of a national politics magazine

Solution – We were presented a detailed brief for the content of this politics website but were encouraged to run riot on the design with the simple instruction to make politics sexy, no small task. As inspiration we looked at other ‘trendy’ magazine websites including GQ and Empire. The trick was to give the site a lot of colour but not include any political party colours as it was to be a non-partisan magazine. Biteback also wanted there to be good reason for people to return again and again so it was important to include ‘social’ features to encourage this. A core part of the site is the blog covering campaigns, local government and PR. Also there’s a news text and video feed, daily questionnaires answered by political figures across the country, databases of famous political quotes, other blogs and an online version of the magazine. All controlled with a content management system working in the background to allow speedy updates in all sections whenever required.

Centre for Policy Studies - www.cps.org.uk

Brief – To completely revamp the old website and draw all the disparate social media elements into one portal.

Solution – Taking inspiration from the recent print design change to 'centre for policy studies' publications we applied the same minimal look to the website. As you would expect, the site is extremely rich in content and information so we decided early on that clear slick navigation was crucial to make it easy to find your way round the site. With numerous publications, articles, lectures and blogs continually being released it was also crucial that CPS could easily update the site. We chose the content management system 'Joomla' and the ecommerce solution 'Actinic' as the interfaces to do this. Joomla in an incredibly powerful open source tool that allowed us to custom tweak plugins to achieve all the elements required to meet the CPS brief.

"Petrol never fail to impress, from their easy and open approach when first discussing our online needs, to their creativity and flexibility when delivering the project, they constantly exceed expectations and raise the bar on their own performance.

And unlike many web design firms, their commitment doesn't end as soon as the website is delivered; Petrol are always on hand to make sure we have what we need when we need it. I really can't recommend them highly enough."

Shane Greer
Executive Editor
Total Politics

"Petrol undertook a thorough revamp of our website – improving functionality, updating the look and design and integrating our audio, video and written output. All the way through the process we found the team to be very helpful and easy to deal with. We are delighted with the new site and it was great to be able to launch it at our 35th anniversary reception this summer."

Jill Kirby
Director
Centre for Policy Studies