Happy New Year! Here's some of our Highlights from 2016

With the new year fast approaching, we look back on an amazing year in Annertech. With new sites launched, multiple awards won and a rapidly growing team, here are some of the more notable moments for us in 2016.

Awards

Agency of the Year!

Undoubtedly our biggest moment this year was being announced as Agency of the Year at the Irish Web Awards! We always knew we had a great team, great clients and delivered some amazing projects, and we are both delighted and honoured to be recognised as the best web design agency in 2016.

ICAD Silver Bell Award

2016 saw the commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising take place across the country and, along with our partners at Zero-G and bigO, we were delighted to play our part in it, creating the Ireland.ie website. Each year the ICAD awards recognise and acknowledge creative excellence in the fields of advertising and design, and we were absolutely delighted for Ireland.ie to take home a Silver Bell in the Website Design category.

Irish Web Awards

With multiple sites shortlisted for this year's Irish Web Awards, including Ireland.ie, Glanbia Nutritionals and Dept of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, we were sure it was going to be a good night. However, we could never have imagined just how great a night it turned out to be! Ireland.ie swept the awards, winning not only Best Arts & Culture Website, but also Most Beautiful Website and Best Website in Ireland! That combined with our win as Agency of the Year meant it was a truely memorable night.

eir Spider Awards

Following on from our success at the Irish Web Awards, we were delighted to hear that one of our first Drupal 8 websites, Glanbia Nutritionals, was shortlisted in the Best in Business2Business category and Annertech were once again shortlisted for Large Agency of the Year. While we were unlucky to win in the agency of year category, we were delighted to come away with the Best in Business2Business award for Glanbia Nutritionals. 

We're absolutely thrilled with the win, and were delighted to be able to partner with Glanbia to deliver this project. We are immensely proud of both the site and our team, and look forward to continuing to deliver more award-winning projects in the future.

 

DrupalCon Dublin 2016

In September we played host to DrupalCon Dublin. We were proud to bring DrupalCon to Dublin and to be able to sponsor it as a Silver sponsor. We had a booth in the exhibit hall all week and also sponsored the Drupal Ireland Welcome Party on the Tuesday evening.

We put a lot of effort into bringing DrupalCon to Dublin and to making it a success. Annertech's Stella Power was the local team lead for the conference and Stella and Mike were track chairs for the business and project management tracks respectively. Alan, Mark and Anthony played the role of MC for the keynotes while other staff members were involved in the not-to-be-missed prenote (which this year featured a Drupal céilí band!).

Annertech staff also presented 5 sessions at DrupalCon, more than any other European agency. We were the only Irish agency with speakers at DrupalCon and they included three first-time DrupalCon presenters. Our sessions included "Building a Co-lingual Site in Drupal", "Choosing Drupal - advice from an Irish multinational", "Future Directions for Drupal Accessibility", "Creating Mobile Apps using Drupal and Ionic Framework" and "Happiness is Remote Working".

As is tradition, the Irish Drupal community ran the infamous Trivia Night, to a record breaking crowd of over 300 participants. Alan once more took on the role of MC, while Stella, Andrew, Tom, Mike, Karen and many others from the Drupal Ireland community helped collect and correct all the answer sheets. It was an absolutely fantastic evening to wrap up a memorable DrupalCon.

 

Continuing to Deliver

We launched 7 new sites in 2016, including a number of Drupal 8 websites. Some of the sites we launched this year include:

• Contemporary Music Centre
• Ireland2016.gov.ie (latest version)
• Department of Housing, Planning, Community & Local Government
• Art Box Worldwide
• Glanbia Nutritionals
• Society of Actuaries in Ireland

And then of course, there's all the other projects we continue to maintain, support, host and develop new features and functionality for.

 

Growing Team

We also were delighted to welcome 8 new staff members - say hi to Ricardo, Adrien, Rob, Karen, Tom, Bren, Lisa and Robert!

 

8 Acquia Certified Developers

We are delighted to have two more of our developers gain their Acquia Certified Developer accrediation this year. This means we now have 8 Acquia Certified Developers on the team. Many congratulations to Tom and Ricardo!!

 

Here's to 2017!

We'd like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all our customers for their continued support and loyalty throughout 2016, and I'd also like to thank the team for all their hard work and dedication in the past year. It's great being part of such a fantastic team. Here's to 2017 and hopefully another amazing year.

From all of us at Annertech, happy new year!