Bespoke online platforms
Centralised platforms that give complex organisations control over their digital estate across all member sites at any scale.
Built-for-purpose online presence at scale
We help large membership organisations build compelling online experiences for their members, branches or brands, with centralised control over branding, content and users across their digital estate.
- Scale to hundreds or thousands of sites
- Choose between local or centralised control
- Automate centralised content
- New sites in just minutes
- Enterprise security with role-based access
- Multilingual ready as standard
Growing pains
Difficulties with running multiple sites
Maintaining multiple websites can be really hard. There are a lot of people, teams and regions involved, and we know that as a result large organisations frequently struggle with issues such as:
High cost of ownership
Domains, SSL certificates and database upgrades all add up with multiple sites
- Regular downtime of some or all sites
- Domains and SSL certificates expire due to difficulty managing them at scale
- System maintenance and upgrades are slow, infrequent and risky
Brand management
Maintaining proper branding across multiple editors, sites and regions is difficult
- Inconsistency in application of brand fonts, colours, logos, imagery or copy
- Coordinating content across sites is difficult
- Too many disconnected websites
- No governance over content
Content control
Having multiple editorial users, teams or sites brings complexities to content and brand management
- Inability to publish content to all sites simultaneously
- Content consistency across multiple editorial teams and sites is hard to maintain
- Editors love nothing more than figuring out new ways to hack the system, style their content slightly differently.
- Duplication of media purchases and messy DAMs
Organisations of all kinds
All in the same boat
Digital estate management isn't limited to businesses. We know that a huge array of organisations and charities have these issues, too; any org with a lot of branches or users that all need individualised online presence.
- Government organisations
- Sports groups and associations
- Membership organisations
- Franchise organisations
- Universities & HE
- Large charities and NGOs
- Event organisations and federations
Non-solutions
Off-the-shelf products and platforms that don't solve your issues
Custom WordPress setups
WordPress is a decent CMS, and you can do (hack?) some really clever things with it - but it's not build for this level of complexity, management and control (or security, let's be honest).
Ultimately, it's a great site for making a bunch of "cookie-cutter" blog sites, but as soon as you want more interesting data architectures, user management, content synchronisation or configuration you're going to hit barriers.
Without a decent platform to manage all those sites, you'll be paying a web administrator or an expensive agency to do all the day-to-day tasks, which will get expensive quickly.
SaaS products, e.g. Wix, Squarespace
Whilst great value for one site at a time, you'll quickly find that managing them all gets hectic (that's why you're here, right?)
Though they do have some provision for allowing users to access and manage multiple sites, you're ultimately limited by their pointy-clicky architecture and won't have the deep level of content and functionality control that you really want.
Unify your online presence with ComputerMinds
Get your content in order
Build a platform that supports your organisation's digital needs
Whether it's ten, a hundred or a thousand sites your organisation needs, the problems are real.
Bringing all those member sites under a single digital estate management platform is a worthwhile investment, and will protect your brand, digital security and future finances.
A platform designed for operation at scale
When you build your digital estate with us, you build on a powerful application framework that can adapt to your workflow, integrate deeply with existing systems and evolve without full rebuilds. It's ready for custom fields, complex business logic and multi-step processes - they're all supported out-of-the-box - and it's built to support your team with self-service administration and development.
Ready for anything
Connectivity is king
Our open-source platform has base integrations ready for hundreds of external applications, boosting development time and expanding the horizon for future development. Where there isn't an integration ready to go, we'll just build it!
Connect to anything and maximise your data's potential
CRM
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM
- Sage
- HubSpot
- MailChimp
- NetSuite
- Brevo
Data, Sales, e-commerce
- Custom databases in SQL, MongoDB, GraphQL, etc.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Sage
- Xero
- Quickbooks
Payments
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Mastercard
- Visa
Go live without disruption
We pride ourselves in seamless software deployments - your sites are in safe hands.
From early technical previews to content freezes, migration tests and phased rollouts, we'll do all we can to ensure that the platform is reliable, tested and validated, and goes live without a hitch.
Early access
Our clients love that we provide system access early on. It allows space for revisions and tweaks that wouldn't be noticed without a real tool to work with, reducing risk, frustration and cost for all sides.
Full rehearsals
When pulling in data from another system or website, we'll run through full rehearsals to ensure that every byte comes across and gets processed correctly. Your team, too, will be able to log in and preview the data, providing another layer of validation and security for the final outcome.
Phased rollouts
"big bang" all-in-one deployments are rarely safe or practical. We'll ensure your team have full access to a running system long before go live day for training, final content building, customisations and testing. Handover to the new system happens when everything is ready and validated, not just on the date the CEO decided six months ago.
Reduced per-site cost
High ROI with long-term systemic efficiency gains too
Swapping multiple site builds, subscriptions and platforms for a single platform brings enormous reductions in the cost per site. Factor in the platform-wide sharing of your domain-specific functionality, built under your initial investment, and you have an impressive value proposition to site members.
Our web platform projects are usually based on Drupal, a powerful web application framework that provides for deep flexibility and rapid extensibility. It makes for a highly scalable solution that keeps running reliably, day and night.
Building with Drupal, an open-source platform, means the platform is yours with no onward licensing or subscription cost - just hosting, maintenance and development. There's no vendor lock-in; should you ever want to take it to a different agency, you could (though we hope you'll enjoy your working relationship us for the long term)
Goodbye, legacy
Replace awkward legacy sites and platforms with a fresh, modern system build for purpose
No licensing
Swap expensive licenses and contracts for tooling your team actually use (and love!)
Truly custom
Not held back by platform requirements or preconceptions, you're free to spec and build exactly what you need
Infinite scale
Host thousands of sites, build millions of pages, never worry about cost