about us

folly has considerable experience in many aspects of working on and with the internet, since that is at the core of our business.

Some of the projects we have helped our clients to deliver include:

Imagined Landscapes for Cumbria Institute of the Arts

Imagined Landscapes was a two day symposium presented by Cumbria Institute of the Arts Centre for Landscape and Environmental Arts Research (CLEAR) in association with the Brera Academy, Milan. The symposium considered the work of leading international practitioners working between and across art forms and with new media technologies to create and explore imagined landscapes. Acting as an online resource, the Imagined Landscapes website informed two distinct areas of research which are of concern to the project partners:

1) How new media art works can help us to understand our relationship with landscape and the environment.

2) How new media tools can enhance academic research. The site was envisioned as a space for artists to share ideas and developments in work on virtual landscapes, to facilitate discussions which offer critical reflection and debate and to provide a stimulus for innovative collaborations between designers, artists, critics, scientists, philosophers and industry experts.

folly designed, hosted and installed a drupal-based website for the Imagined Landscape research theme which supports publication of the outcomes of the Imagined Landscapes symposium and introduces the aims of both partners for the development of the site as a research tool.

'CIA was very pleased to work with Folly on the development of the Imagined Landscapes conference held in October 2006. The website featuring the work of conference speakers, delegates and leading practitioners working in digital landscapes was produced by Folly and may, at some future time and if resources become available, be further developed into a working resource providing information about artists working with digital media whose primary interest is landscape.' - Charles Mitchell, Cumbria Institute of the Arts

TRAMHA for St Martins College in Lancaster

This project is ongoing and folly's role is to host and install a Drupal-based multimedia website that allows the project stakeholders to share and discuss content. We will be training a number of administrators in how to configure Drupal to allow the levels of interaction they are trying to encourage between contributors. Drupal is an open source database-driven content management system that supports multi-user websites hosting text, images, audio and video content.

The project has been structured to enable the high functionality specification to be delivered at a significantly lower cost than was proposed by other vendors.
The flexibility of the project plan allowed the budget to be directed to key areas, such as education, to achieve a higher level of client satisfaction.

Create2Connect for Morecambe Bay Primary Care Trust

Create2connect was a website created by folly to support the Morecambe Bay Arts and Health network. The network's aim was to bring together and facilitate a working relationship between artists and health workers in the Morecambe Bay area. As members lived over a wide geographical area a website was the only way that they could regularly connect. The website provided news of events and projects, exhibitions and training activities happening locally regionally and world wide. In addition it listed resources, funding bodies and useful contacts. The site was built to allow for its development as the network grew. The website boasted a clean design and was easily navigable and members could sign up remotely to receive news first hand from the co-ordinator. The network was held up as an example of best practice in arts and health circles and its membership reached far and wide beyond Morecambe Bay. Unfortunately despite this it was unable to secure long term funding.

Lancashire Artists Database and Lancashire Artists Network for Lancashire County Council

Lancashire Artists Network aims to promote the interests of visual artists and craftspeople living or working in Lancashire.

folly was selected to deliver the following project:
1: To design and implement a website to facilitate networking among Lancashire-based artists, and to provide project management, support and administration of the site.
2: To provide project management, research and implement the Lancashire Artist Database and provide recommendations to Lancaster City Council regarding further development needs.
folly was contracted again from January 2007 to project manage the modernisation of the LAN website, taking into account current user requirements and utilising new technologies.
folly coordinated and project managed all phases of the planning, development and implementation processes including:
• meeting with groups of artists to define the look and feel and functionality of the website
• choosing a flexible and powerful design tool (Drupal) which allowed data items to be searchable and presented in a variety of ways
• the transfer of data from the old to new website
• testing, problem solving and documentation