Websites

Having a digital presence is crucial, and websites are still the core of this, as the space you control. Building your website to the highest industry standards is not only good practice, but also tells the world you care about quality and detail. This includes taking into consideration the accessibility needs of a range of people, including visual, auditory, motor, cognitive, and neurological impairments.  Creating navigation paths which are intuitive and easy for all of your visitors helps them feel good about you and means they can efficiently reach the information and functionality they need. 

We are experts in both accessibility and usability and consider them throughout our development process. They are crucial for creating a positive user experience and an effective website. 

Search is an important navigational tool and, for some of your visitors, it will be the first place they go. Depending on the breadth of your website, we help you find a solution that scales to your needs.

Some projects require a simple out-of-the-box solution providing simple content searches. Other complex sites - which need to expose data inside PDF files or across complex tagged content -  benefit from powerful search solutions such as Apache SOLR or Elastic Search. However your site works, we make search work for you. 

As a digital technology agency, we must remain ahead of the curve, especially with the rapid rise of AI in our day-to-day lives. We’re now working on more and more projects that require integrations with AI tools to help improve efficiency and automation of certain processes, such as projects also require AI co-pilots and chatbots to add layer of interaction to a product, or using translation technologies like DeepL for multi-lingual projects, which we have experience in. If you’re looking to introduce AI to either an existing system or a new product, then we can help you out.

User experiences on websites must be engaging and effective. They help elevate your brand and effectively present information. Animation with intention brings key messages alive, highlights points of interest and facilitates wayfinding through your website. Animation can be as subtle or bold as you and your audiences require and can be a useful way of evolving your website from time-to-time. We use a range of technologies such as GSAP and Anime.JS to create beautiful and memorable experiences for your users.

An Application Programming Interface (API) essentially allows different applications to communicate with each other, allowing seamless exchanges of information and data to support a function. We typically come across APIs with more complex projects, and our developers have vast experience integrating and configuring a variety of APIs across sectors. For our clients within the research and education sector, we commonly integrate APIs that allow them to showcase different research outputs. We’ve also implemented numerous payment systems for clients that have an e-commerce branch to their organisation. Check out some of the APIs we’ve integrated:

• Braintree
• PayPal
• Symplectic
• PubMed
• Airtable
• KX
• Sheep CRM
• Google Maps

We want our design work to enable your users to have interactions with you and your product that are elegant, accessible and memorable. Our designers ground their craft in your story which leads to a tailored experience that truly reflects who you are.

Our design work is imaginative and practical, derived from many years of working in the visual world. We engage you through a collaborative design process, nurturing your requirements and story, creating a foundation for refining and building a design which represents you. Whether the design is needed for brand-work, a website, internal communications or other digital media, our designers use their creative expertise to create a solution which works for you. 

From the very start, we have always leaned towards Drupal as our Content Management System (CMS) and have built over 15 years of experience creating successful solutions using the CMS.

Drupal is an open-source enterprise-grade CMS that’s extremely powerful and versatile. Drupal is the perfect choice for organisations of all shapes and sizes, but really comes into its own for projects that require a more complex or large-scale solution. If you have an organisation that’s rapidly growing, then Drupal is the perfect CMS for you because we build our sites with the headroom that allows you to grow digitally. It’s also renowned for its high level of flexibility and security, with an active community remaining ahead of the game.

Implementing an e-commerce solution for your organisation can feel daunting. There’s a lot to consider to ensure that you choose the right solution for your organisation and allow your customers, whether they are consumers or other businesses, to undertake transactions with you. We help you identify how the purchase process should flow, what data and back-end processing is needed to make it work well, and we design you a platform that does what you need. Whether that’s something out of the box like ‘Shopify’ or a bespoke solution that is tailored to your business requirements, we can help you out. You have the peace of mind that we are security experts. We are ISO 27001 accredited, which is the leading standard in information security management and helps to ensure that you are resilient and performant.

A Headless Content Management System (CMS) is an excellent way of delivering a high-performance platform that can be served across multiple channels. This could be across several websites or a combination of a website and an application. From a technical standpoint, the technical backend is detached from the visual frontend. The link is formed via an API, creating a separate environment for admins to work in. Headless CMS come into its own when you have multiple output channels by keeping content locked in a centralised space. Previously, you would have separate systems for each platform, which creates extra work for all involved.

We have used numerous technologies like VueJS and React to create incredibly fast and multi-faceted digital experiences for a range of clients. If you have a project that you think may need a Headless CMS, then we would love to chat it through with you.

Intranets are a brilliant way to make everyone’s job and experience within an organisation much easier. An intranet can offer a wealth of services. It’s a communication tool, a way to find all sorts of information, share files, undertake functions such as booking meeting rooms or ordering catering. It’s a great channel for onboarding new starters, can provide a hub for training and procedures and much more. Different access levels can be set so that the correct people see the information that they need, safeguarding information and security. 

Developing an intranet for a client is one of our favourite briefs. To enable an organisation to function much more efficiently by digitising different types of information is very rewarding to us as developers, as we see the benefit to the client instantly. We often build bespoke intranet solutions as these often allow greater flexibility for users, and we also have experience working with more out-of-the-box solutions such as SharePoint.

Before we embark on any technical work, we simply start by listening.  We listen to everyone who you think needs to input their knowledge, experience, wants, needs and wisdom into the brief we are about to take on. This is a crucial first step in our process. It’s an opportunity for us to learn about your organisation straight from the people who work there, we get to understand how things work, what you need and why.

When we’re finished talking, we go away and analyse what we’ve found, turning the many conversations into crystal clear insights. These insights paint a picture of the ‘now’ and provide us with a bridge to a vision for the future, forming the backbone of our recommended solutions. We then take these insights and begin crafting a narrative that tells your story as an organisation. Our narrative writing serves as an internal document for you and your team to hold that not only forms the basis of the website project, but also weaves through every fabric of your organisation. The final result is ultimately a cohesive package that reflects the very core of your organisation, creating a digital experience that resonates with your users.

A well-built website must be secure, fast and maintainable. It must be easy for you to use and support you in achieving your objectives. It's not enough to look good on the first demo. It needs to work hard for you day in and day out. We want you to positively enjoy working with the website we build for you. 

As your needs evolve, your website must evolve with you, building on a robust and extendable foundation. The back-end code needs to be as elegant and well-structured, as the front-end that you see. Just like a well-engineered motor keeps your car purring along, a quality codebase keeps your website running smoothly. 

To find an agency to build your digital product is one thing, but to find one that puts security at the heart of everything they do is fairly rare. Here at Olamalu, we pride ourselves on being a secure and reliable partner. We take great care in handling your product throughout the development cycle and beyond, backed up with an industry-leading ISO 27001 certification, so you can have peace of mind that your project is in good hands.

From the very start of a project, we incorporate information security into our project management processes. We take a structured software development approach with a defined strategy for testing and review. We follow a rigorous code governance process. We invest in the knowledge and skills of our developers and the tools to support them to ensure that they can apply secure coding principles and practices. Regular audits validate our approach and help us to continue to improve. 

Beauty and elegance are important elements in any design, but can be undermined if the UX is not taken care of thoughtfully. UX design focuses on improving the overall user experience and usability. It works hand-in-hand with visual design with crafts your look and feel and with user interface (UI) design which focuses on making visual elements attractive and interactive. 

UX is an integral part of the design that will help your users achieve their goals. We use industry-standard design discovery processes that get to the heart of your pain points and what your organisation is looking to achieve. We distil those outputs into a UX plan that works within the design, which we test thoroughly and evolve to ensure that it works for you and your users.

These popular web development technologies can be used to create highly customised user experiences and interfaces. They are especially useful when working with data, dashboards and workflows. Their versatility also enables us to create advanced presentation displays and user interactions. Each one of these technologies has its own strengths, and the one we choose for a specific project depends on an assessment of the requirements. 

Web apps, accessed by a browser, enable the user to have a rich and interactive experience.  They work well for interactive and task-oriented needs such as project management, resource booking or shopping/e-commerce.

We have a wealth of experience in building a web app that is perfect for your organisation. As with all of our projects, we will work with you from the initial brief and requirements, map out a solution, build, develop and implement the app, alongside ensuring that it is supported and given regular and timely security updates.

Over the years, WordPress has built a solid reputation as a trusted Content Management System (CMS) for websites within a range of different sectors. This is partly down to the large community supporting the platform and the arsenal of plug-ins. 

We have a team that’s experienced in handling WordPress projects and delivering them to an incredibly high standard. We are particularly sensitive to building WordPress securely, and we configure websites in a way that is seamless for site admins to manage and maintain. With it being an open-source platform, there’s an extensive range of customisation options to tailor bespoke solutions within WordPress to your organisational needs.