Blog

Find out more about Volute's first ever website back in the last millenium - and take a visit to look around the vintage website we dug out of cold storage.

If your organisation handles personal data, you need to be prepared for the possibility that someone will complain about how you've used it. Under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, there are now formal, legally binding requirements for how you must handle those complaints. Here's what you need to know.

Lunchtimes this week meant putting on a warm overcoat and walking around Nottingham's beautiful Lace Market - all the photos here were within 200m of our office. The November shadows are so beautiful, the pictures almost took themelves.

Our MD, Tim Ryan, looks back over the 25 years of Volute in the first of series of blog articles looking at how the technology and web has changed in the last quarter of a century and how Volute's offerings have responded to these.

A new learning management system we developed for the East Midlands Cancer Alliance - Aspirant Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialist Development Programme - has won the 2024 East Midlands Chamber of Commerce award for ‘Excellence in Collaboration’, with the awards ceremony being held in Nottingham.

Did you know that Volute was set up at the dawn of the internet? We are now celebrating our 25th anniversary this month (October 2024). Volute was set up in 1999 at the founder Tim Ryan’s West Bridgford home but has grown over the years, now based in the city’s Lace Market area, with a team of creative and technical experts. The company’s foundation came only eight years after the internet arrived in 1991 when Sir Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website.

In a ground-breaking partnership, Volute teamed up with the East Midlands Cancer Alliance (EMCA) to create the Aspirant Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialist Development Programme, to offer cancer nurses unprecedented access to learn new skills and gain valuable expertise.  We are pleased to announce that this programme has been recognised in the Nottinghamshire Business Awards 2024 Excellence in Collaboration category.

We have held a webinar which runs through the benefits of our Learning Management System (LMS) we developed for East Midlands Cancer Alliance to encourage more nurses to become Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialists.

Earlier this month, myself and Giles Metcalfe of Giles Metcalfe Digital delivered a webinar on Cookie-free analytics.

Did you notice when you first visited this page the absence of cookie-consent pop-ups? That’s because we don’t use cookies on this site - but we still manage to effectively monitor how our website is used by our visitors. Fancy losing the annoying cookie banner on your website? Then read on. 

Considering a redesign of your website and wondering where to start? As a former architect, I believe there needs to be a rational process to underpin any design, be it for a building or for redesigning a website.

Why run a virtual event? We’ve summarised 3 reasons our clients here at Volute have been utilising our virtual venue.

I’ve been working from home in what is one of the darkest rooms in my house, so I’ve had to be pretty creative in lighting for video.  While the natural light coming through my window here is nice, it’s unfortunately behind me. We need the room to be lit evenly and having light streaming in behind me would make me look like a ghost! Here, I’ve got a light shining at the white wall behind my computer, which helps to reflect and diffuse light onto me! 

Most of us not on the UK front line have now been locked away for just over a week and have had to adapt almost every area of our lives that we took for granted. Here are a few of my thoughts of the initial phases of the Coronavirus lockdown - and how we can look at the many positives that may arise out of a terrible situation.

This article is based on an excellent piece by Nielsen | Norman - you can read the full article here. I'm summarising the article below whilst adding our own take as web developers as to the issues that this design approach can bring up.

A good website design is vital to creating an enjoyable online experience for the viewer. 40-60% of viewers click on a website and immediately exit the website (a term we call 'bounce'), this means you lose potential customers. A high proportion of users bounce simply because they don't like the design of the website.

Most modern websites are not a simple set of documents but instead composed using a series of inter-connected online software packages, running 24 hours a day to deliver content to your visitors. As with all software, this needs updating to give you new features, fix bugs and plug security holes to counteract the activity of online hackers. 

Using your website for job vacancies is an obvious way to try to recruit staff, bypassing recruitment agencies.  We'll show you how one of our clients uses their whole website to show what a great firm they are to work for.

From January through to March, healthcare organisations are busy developing their business plans for the year ahead, which The Department of Health issues guidelines to help with. Healthcare organisations use this as an opportunity to review their current services and look at how they can improve these as well as considering the development of new services.

We want to share with you some ways in which you can start to make your website work for your business. 1. Professional design and easy navigation Many businesses don't have a shopfront so the first time someone comes into contact with your business will be online.