Reflecting back on 2017

New digital projects launched

From small to big, we launched a large number of projects this year. The first stage of each project was to relaunch their digital presence to provide a better user and editor experience and to ensure they delivered on key organisational goals. We look forward to continuing to work with these clients in 2018.

During the course of 2017, there was a wide range of projects delivered. These included micro-sites which took only a matter of weeks to complete, to major undertakings that spanned several months.

Here's just a brief overview of just some of the projects we worked on.

Creative Ireland Programme - Ireland.ie

The Creative Ireland Programme is a groundbreaking concept for Ireland. It strives to put culture and creativity at the forefront of public policy. With Ireland.ie, we had the opportunity to create a single proposition, based on Irish culture and creativity, that represents a considered, compelling and imaginative view of how we wish to be seen by the outside world.

Alongside our partners, Zero-G and BigO, we set out to design and build a responsive website that reflected the boundless creativity and cultural diversity that makes Ireland special. Our solution was to discover and understand exactly how other countries branded themselves. We drew great inspiration from examining other national websites and by studying these we could understand how other nations positioned themselves in a global context. We used those insights, combined with the mission and vision of the Creative Ireland Programme to create a new highly-user-focused website. 

Limerick.ie

Limerick.ie aims to represent Limerick in an engaging manner to a number of target audiences including residents, tourists and businesses. It is an innovative platform that is mobile ready and features over 3,000 attractions, services, events and businesses in Limerick in a comprehensive and easily accessible way. With Limerick.ie we now have a website that proudly declares to the world that Limerick is a great place to live, visit, work, study, do business with and invest in.

Soon after its launch, it was named as one of the world’s Top 25 best tourism websites for 2017 by the travel industry global intelligence platform Skift.com. It also won a Chambers Ireland Excellence in Local Government Award for Outstanding Customer Service and was shortlisted at the recent Eir Spiders Awards in the Best in User Experience category. 

GlanbiaNutritionals.com multilingual

Since launching GlanbiaNutritionals.com last year, we have continued to develop the site with new features, including the rollout of multilingual, multi-region capability. This sees the content translated into 9 distinct languages across 4 different regions, including Russian and Chinese. Not only is the content translated into the different languages, but it is also localised to the site visitor's region.

Other work

Above is just a taster of some of the projects we've worked on this year. We also delivered a wide variety of other projects, for SMEs, for example www.monkstownphysiotherapy.ie, for the public sector, including www.ichec.ie and www.EmergencyPlanning.ie, and for larger businesses such as Avonmore.ie.

And then of course, let's not forget all the other clients we continue to maintain, support, host and develop new features and functionality for.

Awards

2016 was an amazing year for us, especially when it came to winning awards, which saw us win 6 awards, including Agency of the Year at the Irish Web Awards It was always going to be a tough year to follow, but we haven't faired too badly in 2017 either.

The year started well with yet another win for Ireland2016.gov.ie at the Digital Media Awards. Since then Limerick.ie was named as one of the world’s Top 25 best tourism websites for 2017 by Skift.com. In addition to these two honours, we were also shortlisted for Best Web Development Agency 2017 at the Dot IE Net Visionary Awards, while Limerick.ie was shortlisted for Best in User Experience category at the recent Eir Spiders.

Events

Continually improving and updating our skills is extremely important to us at Annertech, and part of doing that involves attending events to ensure we stay on top of current trends. We attended numerous events from technical events to design events to marketing events, such as Learn Inbound and Pixel Pioneers.

However, events are also a chance for us to share our knowledge and experience with others, so we were delighted to be able to speak at DrupalCamp London, Women Who Code, Become an IT Girl, Frontend United Athens, DrupalCamp Dublin and of course, most importantly DrupalCon Vienna. We were absolutely thrilled, for the second year in a row, to have 5 speaking slots at this year's DrupalCon Vienna. We spoke on varied topics including "Lessons Learned from Building a Large Multilingual, Multi-region Site in Drupal 8", "Estimates are dead, long live forecasting!", "Back to the Future: No More Static Mockups!" and "Core Accessibility: How are we doing, and what can we do better?". Then to cap it off, a live performance workshop by Anthony.

Roll on 2018!

It's worth noting that we couldn't possibly continue to deliver such fantastic projects (and win amazing awards) without the help of our incredible team. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank them for their continued commitment, hard work and enthusiasm in the past year. Here's to a fantastic team, fantastic clients and hopefully a fantastic 2018!

From all of us at Annertech, happy new year!