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Looking back over 25 years: a series of firsts
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.
"When I first set up Volute 25 years ago in 1999 it was driven by my observations on the state of websites on the early World Wide Web - ‘surely someone can do better than this?’ "
Looking back over 25 years, if anything is to sum up Volute as an organisation it is to pursue excellence, to continually improve our websites’ designs, architecture and technology in order to keep our customers ahead of their peers and competitors.
Let’s take a look at some milestones:
1999 First website - Victoria Shopping Centre, Nottingham
The thing to remember about the early web is that computers were basic, monitors were very small and internet speeds in the bre-broadband, pre-wifi era were very, very, slow!
In fact if you illegally downloaded 1999’s top-selling Britney Spears single ‘Baby One More Time’ from the new Napster service, it would have taken you 23 minutes, even with the fastest modem!
The slow speed meant that everything had to be really optimised for size - images and page coding needed to be really compact in order for pages to load at speeds faster than a crawl.
Our Christmas 2000 microsite for the Victoria Centre show just how basic webpages needed to be and how small monitors were. However, a comparison with Microsoft's own website from the turn of the millenium shows that our designs were ahead of the curve, even in these early days.
2007 - First NHS website - NHS Nottingham City PCT
By 2007 things had moved on but I still remember in our NHS customer focus group that 80% of the participants had not been on the World Wide Web - but were still keen on giving opinions on how the website should look and work!
Our work for the Primary Care Trust involved helping them with organising their information so that it was more easily findable and accessible for patients and stakeholders.
2010 - First mobile-friendly website - Institute of Mental Health
The first iPhone with true useful web browsing was released in the second half of 2008 and by 2010 a wave of users were starting to browse the web on their mobile devices. Our analytics had detected that there was a range of users to the Institute’s website using mobile phones.
We then retrofitted responsive coding onto the website to allow users to access a dedicated mobile-friendly view of the website content - highly innovative then.
We are still working with the Institute, some 16 years after we designed their first ever website.
