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We have a new team member: Meet Kirsten.
 

We've added a new member to the Storm family! We're excited to welcome Kirsten, who has joined us as our Office Assistant.

Kirsten will be helping us out around the office, welcoming and looking after our clients, assisting Alice (our Project & Ops Manager) with administration, keeping us all in line, and generally making each day run smoothly. Get to know her in our latest blog.

Storm & TechSPARK: supporting the digital community.

We're pleased to announce that Storm is now a principal supporter and sponsor of TechSPARK, the leading Tech and Digital hub for the South West.

Storm has been involved in TechSPARK since its early days of launching, and we are very proud to have watched it develop over the years. Once we''re all allowed out of our houses again, we''ll be looking forward to getting much more involved in everything that's going on across the region this year.

We''re hiring a Full Stack Web Developer.

This is an exciting opportunity to join our award-winning digital product development team based in the beautiful city of Bath. We're looking for a web developer to join our Ruby on Rails team. Our ideal candidate will have experience programming in a relevant web technology and will also have a confident grasp of web essentials. 

Any successful non-Rubyist candidate must be willing and able to quickly learn Ruby on Rails, though of course support and mentoring will be provided. If you know anyone who may be interested in this position please ask them to get in touch!

We're so excited to finally launch our new organisation, Co-forest. 

The aim of Co-forest is to bring together a community of like-minded individuals and organisations to preserve land and plant new woodland or forestry near their town or city. Find out how you can get involved over on our blog.

Start to spread the word by following Co-forest''s social media channels:

A few years ago we worked with Registered Charity, Bath Beekeepers to help them build a new and engaging website. Recently, we revisited their site to help them create some new features as well as giving it a bit of a spruce up. With some great results!

Congratulations to our client, Truespeed, who recently won the Technology and Innovation award at the Bath Life Awards. 

Over the last year, thousands more homes across the South West have been connected to Truespeed's ultrafast broadband and they're working very hard to get more happy customers on board throughout 2020. They very much deserved this win and we''re proud to be helping them create a new website and improved user experience.
 

Another successful year of Bath Digital Festival!

Bath Digital Festival has come and gone for another year. BDF adapted to the 2020 online era and put on 60 events over the course of 5 days via their website. Hundreds of attendees from around the world, not just Bath, tuned into the festival. It's safe to say that Bath Digital Festival 2020 was a huge success.

As well as being sponsors of this year's festival, our CEO David Kelly, hosted some of Bath and Bristol's most renowned founders. They discussed their most pivotal moments in business and how they made them successful.

Our first guest was Col Needham, the founder of IMDb...

Storm are delighted to announce that we have been working on 'Getting Married'!

No, no one in the team is getting married, that's just the name of our most recent client project!

Getting Married is your new go-to platform to organise your wedding and wedding website. From guest list management, invitations, table planning and much more. It's everything you need to coordinate the perfect wedding, all in one place. You can even get stationery that matches your website! 

Prior to the lockdown announcement over the weekend, the Storm office saw our doors shut once again to protect the health of the team and public. We really miss our office environment but we understand how important it is to stay at home during this time. We also really miss hosting Friends of Storm and once the world allows it, we will welcome you back to Storm Towers with open arms.

Storm Takes Home Best Digital Design

Last Thursday the much anticipated SPARKIES took place online. The SPARKIES are something we look forward to each year. We get to celebrate and recognise the tech sector in Bristol, Bath and the broader West of England region.

The SPARKIES were hugely entertaining despite taking the stage on attendees laptop screens. Congratulations to Ben, Ash and the rest of the TechSPARK team for putting together such a great show!

We are absolutely thrilled to end the year on a high by winning the 'Best Digital Design' award, the second of its kind this year. We have been recognised again for our work with Brevio. This is a real testament to our team's talent and hard work and we are delighted they won this award!

If bringing digital products to life is your passion and if working with some amazing startups and scale ups excites you, then this may be the role for you. 

In this role, we're looking for a web developer to join our Ruby on Rails team. Our ideal candidate would have commercial experience programming in a relevant language (e.g. Ruby, PHP, Python) and will also have a confident grasp of web essentials (HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript.)  Any successful non-Rubyist candidate must be willing and able to quickly learn Ruby on Rails, though of course support and mentoring will be provided.

Applications close at 5pm on Friday 8th January 2021

This role is a blend of project and account management, with an amount of operational responsibility alongside. As such, we're looking for an individual who has worked within an agency environment and has significant experience managing digital software projects.

You'll need to be able to form strong productive working relationships with our clients and partners, whilst not being at all phased by the technicality of the work we do and language we use internally within the organisation.

The Head of Projects is part of the SMT (Senior Management Team) which means that this role has both operational and strategic elements. Whilst on a day-to-day basis you'll be working closely with clients and our team, you'll also join weekly SMT meetings alongside the CEO and CTO. In addition to the project/client-responsibilities, our Office Manager reports directly to this role and you are tasked with the smooth running of the workplace (be it virtual or physical).

Applications close at 5pm on Friday 8th January 2021

We are now welcoming applications from charities throughout the UK to let us know how we can help. Whether it's giving them some time in kind, building a new website or getting out there and fundraising on their behalf, we want to know how we can help!

Applications/ nominations take no more than 5-10 minutes to complete and are open until Tuesday 5th January 2021. Our new charity of the year will be announced shortly after this date.

Please find the form here and please share this with any charities you think we can help!

Storm 10 Year Anniversary Team Retreat.

With COVID-19 halting our plans for this year's Storm Retreat (yes it was supposed to be in a couple of weeks time ??) we thought we'd reminisce over last year's incredible trip to Salcombe. Plus a short video to see what we got up to!
 

Celebrating 10 years of innovation.

As we continue to celebrate our 10^th year of business, we've been looking back over some of our favourite and game-changing projects that we've worked on over the years. We've been lucky enough to work on hundreds of client projects over the past decade, each with their own unique ideas and niches in their industries, so it's always exciting to start something new.
 
We enjoy every project we work on but in this blog the team talk about a few of their 'stand-out's.

Designability: the Bath based charity changing lives.
 

As part of our 10 year anniversary celebrations, we decided to introduce an annual 'Charity of the Year' to support. As a team we deliberated on a number of fantastic causes and collectively agreed that our first chosen charity would be Designability. Over the past few months we have been providing Designability with in-kind digital support to help them improve their online presence, creating an online fundraising campaign and helping out with any projects they may be working on. Here we explain more about what this incredible charity does.
 

We are very excited to announce that Brevio has launched their website and grant application platform. Storm has been Brevio's dedicated technology partner for the past 18 months helping to design, build and develop their idea to transform the way charities apply for grant funding in the UK. Research found that ?1.1 billion per year was being spent by charities writing multiple grant applications, yet 66% failed to gain funding. Brevio's mission was to create one standardised application form to increase their chances of success.

This is a truly game-changing platform that can really make a difference to charities, so we''d really appreciate it if you could share Brevio with your network.

Our partner company CiteAb has created a temporary manually curated data service to help researchers find reagents for their research during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Founder, Dr Andrew Chalmers explained: "We're aiming to develop a platform that will give researchers a unique view of the reagents that are available and how they have been used so far. This will help researchers more rapidly and efficiently identify the reagents they need to carry out their research on Sars-Cov-2 and the COVID-19 outbreak." 

If CiteAb is able to secure funds to develop a permanent technological framework required to power this service, it could also be rapidly repurposed to support researchers in the fight against any future epidemics.

CiteAb (built by the Storm team) is a world-leading reagent and antibody search engine and is currently saving the Life Science industry over ?1billion a year!

During a time when every piece of data available is hugely beneficial, we''re really proud of CiteAb taking steps to aid the global fight against coronavirus.
 

All the colours of Storm.

Ever thought about what colour you might be? Recently we met with C-me Colour Profiling to determine the personality types within the Storm team and how best to communicate together. We still can't understand how they got it so accurate. It must be some sort of wizardry ?????
 

Coping with COVID-19: Ask us anything.

As digital technology experts we've spent the past 10 years helping develop businesses online. So if you now find yourself in the situation of having to temporarily trade online, we're happy to point you in the right direction. Equally, if you're looking for suggestions for how to move some of your general business processes or team communications to a digital format, we can try to provide you with some time-saving advice.  Details for how to get in touch are on our website.

Seeking Out the Next Generation.
 

There's a new podcast in town. Created and hosted by our friends at Dialect, Seeking Out (SO) is a podcast featuring everyday people with inspiring stories to tell.

And Storm is proud to be sponsoring their first ever season!
 

Last month we launched our new organisation, Co-forest, with the aim of raising money to plant a new forest in the Bath & Bristol area. Unfortunately, we have had to put a bit of a delay on things due to the recent pandemic, however, we''d really appreciate the help in growing our social media channels in the meantime! Please feel free to give us a follow on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, and share our project with others! 
 

Last year we hosted three university students at Storm for our first ever 'Two Week Tech Accelerator'. Zach, Fraser and Gus joined us for a crash course in developing their business idea, ''unirent''. We''re pleased to see that they''ve now launched their website! The guys have done a great job building the website themselves and already have plenty of review content live on their site. Read all about their business idea over on our blog.
 

Well nobody expected 2020 to take a turn quite like this right?! Whilst we did a small element of contingency planning a few weeks prior to 'lockdown', having to shut down our office and move solely to remote working still ended up being a shock to us all! To help adjust, we've come up with some ideas to make sure our team stay in contact and still enjoy each other's company.

Plus, we've put together a list of some of the digital tools we use to help keep work on track and communication effective. We hope it may come in useful!

BVNA: The Voice of Veterinary Nursing.

We are excited to announce the launch of BVNA's new website!
BVNA is the British Veterinary Nursing Association. They are the only representative organisation for veterinary nurses and other veterinary support staff in the UK.
We have updated BVNA's website to bring a fresh visual impact whilst adhering to their brand guidelines. The website has a friendlier user experience throughout and is simpler to navigate.

At the beginning of August we welcomed some of the team back into the office.

In the weeks leading up to reopening, Alice and Kirsten very kindly "Covid Proofed" Storm Towers. They also did a little, ahem, a lot. of plant shopping and the office now feels more like a jungle paradise than a place of work. Not that anyone's complaining.

See below how we welcomed the team back and have made the office a safe place to come back to.

We have a new addition to the Storm team! We're pleased to welcome our latest team member, Claudia, who will be joining us as our new marketing manager.

Claudia has just moved back to Bath after two years in London working in sales for an entrepreneurial focused Private Members Club. She has also been running her own e-commerce company for several years which stemmed from writing a blog.

At Storm, development of a new website is underway. After three years it's time for an upgrade that represents how the company has evolved. As a newbie to Storm, I decided to ask Tom, our Creative Director, what elements of a website you should consider during the design process in order to create a positive user experience.

Truespeed: Truly Better Broadband.

We''re pleased to announce that we have launched a new website for innovative broadband provider, Truespeed. Truespeed is a leading edge ultrafast, full fibre broadband business based in the South West. They are building a brand new network that removes frustration such as buffering, drops and slow speeds at peak times. They aim to give the South West a truly future-proofed broadband solution that is unparalleled in its capability.
 

IAAPS: Advancing the zero emission automotive industry.

We're pleased to announce that our latest front-end website project has gone live for IAAPS. For the past few months we have been working with the Institute for Advanced Automotive Propulsion Systems (IAAPS) which is a ?70million research and innovation hub aiming to develop ultra-low and zero emission vehicles. Read all about what they do and how we created their new website.

We''ve added a new case study to our website! LifeJacket was one of the projects we were incredibly proud to have launched a few months ago so we''ve decided to add it to the Our Work page to showcase our hardwork. Check it out now .
 

We''re very excited to have been shortlisted for this year''s Creative Bath Awards. As finalists for Agency of the Year, Website of the Year and Dave for Founder of the Year. We''re excited for the upcoming awards ceremonies (in whatever capacity they may be!). Fingers crossed that the final few months of our 10 year anniversary ends on a high!
 

The UK tech sector is speeding ahead of other areas of the UK''s economy and it is evident that there is a healthy mix of both established technology companies and an increasing number of tech start-ups across regional 'tech hubs'. And the West Country is one of those places!
 

This year took quite an unexpected turn, so we thought we'd provide a quick update on how things are progressing with Co-forest, our carbon offsetting forest being planted in the Bath and Bristol area.
 
We softly launched Co-forest back in March and we are so excited to have already raised over ?150,000 worth of pledges from local businesses and the general public!
 
As you know we aimed to purchase land this summer and begin planting in Autumn/Winter 2020. However, due to the unexpected outbreak of COVID-19, we have decided to adjust our timeframes slightly. 
 

We just wanted to take one last opportunity to say thank you for all of your support over the past 10 years. Whether you''ve been a client, team member, friend or colleague, we couldn''t have achieved everything we have without your help. Here''s to the next 10!