Studio Scrapbook
October 2023

The Fanatic team recently visited Old Market Assembly in Bristol for a hand-building pottery class by the lovely Potty Mouth team.

We had the opportunity to design and create our very own mugs, which we’ll all be proudly using for our hot drinks in the Fanatic studio. Our competitive and creative spirit kicked in as expected, leading to some wild and unique designs! Look out for our next scrapbook and Instagram to see the finished products.

We have continued to work with The City of Bristol College to set another design brief. We’ve decided to set a brief around a sector we are really passionate about and an area of design that we feel is key to any aspiring graphic designer.

The topic is based on restaurant branding, and the outcome is to design a website with a focus on user journeys and user experience. We’ve always loved being involved in the briefing, reviewing, and feedback we can give aspiring designers, and this is a great opportunity to do so.

The students so far have been set the task and will be working on their ideas and concepts. Over the coming weeks, we will have an interim review and then a final presentation of their outcomes.

We have built many UMBRACO sites over the years which we also host and maintain. Umbraco is Microsoft’s ‘open source’ website CMS, which we use for clients who want to stay within the Microsoft technology stacks, yet it still allows us to design and build a completely bespoke theme starting from a blank canvas, so that the sites fit perfectly in terms of brand as well as UX for the clients’ needs.

With UMBRACO version 8, the software was based on a completely new version of the .NET language called .NET Core. This meant more of a rebuild and migration of content, than many previous releases which could be much more routinely upgraded, tested and put live.

With UMBRACO 7 support finishing imminently, it has been time to migrate any older sites, and we were able to take them to UMBRACO Version 10.
To do this we created some migration scripts to migrate data from the old databases to the new ones, and to take over in some cases vast media libraries, reconstructing every page to give an apparently identical website, with other than the changing of user passwords, no disruption to service.

A major advantage of .NET Core is that we can run these websites within a load-balanced AWS environment giving redundancy of the code base as new servers can be set up automatically to allow for scaling in the event of a problem, or to handle scale. To do this the media must live in the AWS S3 storage, and databases are served from the AWS RDS system.
In less technical language it means that it can utilise the cloud hosting which gives huge speed and reliability gains.

The code base behind a website is perhaps not something that most website owners will appreciate until it goes wrong, and the sort of work we do to upgrade allows websites to keep performing well so that owners can keep focussing on business performance!

This month, we’re thrilled to highlight the success of our partnership with Klaviyo, the premier email tool we use for retention strategies. Given the remarkable outcomes we’ve achieved by crafting email flows for our clients, it felt natural to strengthen our bond by becoming official partners. This partnership allows us to liaise directly with Klaviyo’s account managers. The benefits? We’re now gaining insights into best service practices, increased customer satisfaction, and enhanced client retention.