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  • 2017 year in review

What an interesting year it’s been for CTI in 2017. We’ve had plenty of things to celebrate and have seen huge growth this year on the back of a range of new and existing client wins.

 

Site Launches

All the way back in January we put live our first Magento 2 site for High Street TV. Since the launch they’ve seen a huge 175% Increase in sessions to the new site, so it’s safe to say we started the year with a bang. We are working with clients to upgrade their current Magento 1 sites before the support period ends from Magento in September next year.

Early in 2017 we also started work with Merlin Entertainments managing their Umbraco websites for Alton Towers & Thorpe Park. We also relaunched the Merlin Annual pass website with great success, achieving 43% reduction in site load time and 17% reduction in mobile bounce rate. We’ve been building a great relationship with Merlin, as a result of the successful partnership we’re also working on some exciting projects for the brand including the Bear Grylls adventure website and SW8 for Alton Towers...but more on that is to be revealed in 2018.

We are also immensely proud to have rebuilt the Royal College of Occupational Therapists site, which involved a huge site migration of 15,000 pages. The team worked tirelessly with the client to produce a new best in class site which has seen great feedback since it went live in May.

CTI have been hugely important in us developing how we deliver our digital tools. I would highly recommend them for their thoroughness, attention to detail and always friendly and helpful approach!

James Patterson - 31 of May, 2017 British Association of Occupational Therapists Ltd


Summer was another exciting period for CTI. In July we launched Malibu’s Pina Colada day website, a micro site offering free pina coladas across the country to celebrate national pina colada day on the 10th July. Of course, we also celebrated national Pina Colada day ourselves by having our own party in the office...

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 National Pina Colada Day at the CTI bar.

In October we launched Prolific North’s new and improved website. We were really excited to be working with the leading northern publisher, and worked closely with the client to deliver new features to showcase local companies and make job hunting on the platform even easier.

 

Expanding Our Skills

To deliver the best solutions for our clients we have also been expanding our technology stack this year, paving the way for CTI Digital to become a more technology agnostic agency. We have been working with Shopify to launch an eCommerce store for Alton Towers Merchandise and ZenDesk integration for Legoland Discovery Centres.

At CTI we are committed to continually improving our services so I am extremely proud of the team for gaining ISO 9001:2015 accreditation. This has been an ongoing project we have been working towards for a few years now and I feel its rewards have already started to show with more consistency across projects and teams within CTI. When onboarding new staff, we are also seeing them build their understanding of our process much more rapidly thanks to the work that went towards the accreditation.

With new clients onboarding regularly we have also bolstered our marketing team and seen continued growth and capabilities within our advertising and SEO services.

This year hasn’t been wholly been about the new websites. We've also seen a huge growth in our support services where we conduct health checks on existing sites built outside of CTI and take over their ongoing development. This has amassed in us offering support and continual development to a number of clients who achieve a combined sessions of over 67 million per year.

 

Events in 2017

Throughout 2017 we’ve attended a number of events and conferences to be immersed in the tech community. As usual our developers attended a number of conferences this year such as DrupalCon Vienna, and a number sponsored by CTI, including Mage Titans and NWDUG Unconference. We were also pleased to support many of our team who spoke at these events feeding back their skills to the community. 

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Graham, one of our Drupal Developers talking at NWDUG Unconference.

 

We also exhibited at Prolific North Live, eCommerce Show North, and the Public Sector Show in Manchester. Our experts took part in talks at each event providing thought leadership in the areas we strive to continually contribute to through our open source mentality. Ian, our Commerce Director spoke on the rapidly approaching future of one click payment systems, and Paul our Drupal Director delivered an extreemly well received educational presentation to members of the public sector on our work for the Greater London Authority. 

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Our Ecommerce Director, Ian, talking about checkoutless commerece at eCSN17.

 

With things as busy as they always are at CTI, it's nice to have a chance to pause and take stock of what we have achieved this year. I am extremely proud of the CTI Digital team and I’m truly looking forward to 2018 and all that we can achieve with our clients. Especially in the exciting projects and plans we already have in place for the next year.

Finally, I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and prosperous 2018. If you'd like to work with us in 2018, please get in contact and we'll be in touch in the new year.

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Drupalcamp London 2018

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