Concept4 Year End Review 22-23

May marks the end of another busy year completed here at Concept4. 2023 has absolutely flown by so far and suddenly we are discussing which projects will be completed in time for our financial year end. It feels great though to be back to a year of genuine growth and progress following some COVID affected stagnation. Significantly, hybrid working has now been fully established in this period with all the team in the office on Wednesday and Thursday but working from home the rest of the week. Flexibility has been the key and overall we feel we have achieved a good working balance for both the business and the team.

WONDERFUL WEBSITES

Some wonderful projects were completed in a very active year for our sales, design, digital and client support staff. Alongside dozens of school websites produced, three noteworthy college websites were developed for Mary Ward, Dudley College and Bridgend College. Mary Ward is an adult education centre who are relocating this summer to a new larger learning space in Stratford, East London. To support the move, they have created a new striking brand for maximum recognition and the client is thrilled with how the brand has been applied to the new website. We love the design of this website too. We are now working with them on enhancing further their online rankings. The Dudley College website evolved as an integrated marketing and design led solution. We are really happy with it and Dudley College themselves are over the moon. They were impressed with our ability to integrate the college systems into their website, saying they “look forward to a long working relationship” with us. You can read all about the five fantastic features of the Bridgend College project here from a previous blog. We have also already started work on the numerous print projects we manage over the summer for various education publications, including lots of school prospectuses.

MISCELLEANEOUS MILESTONES

In September we co-hosted a webinar on the importance of accessibility in developing websites, a topic which is continuing to grow in importance. In November we ran a workshop at College Marketing Network. As a well-regarded supplier in the sector we were invited to share our knowledge. The focus of this enjoyable session was how to build a website that results in successful recruitment. On a lighter note, in December we enjoyed an internal celebrity lookalikes competition. Each member of staff was compared to a celebrity and competed in a series of knockout rounds until we had the best Concept4 celebrity lookalike. The winner was Patrick, whose lookalike is comedian Jason Manford. Since then rumours of legal action from Jason Manford’s representatives have been greatly exaggerated! I have kept busy myself writing fourteen blogs over the year. For the first time though artificial intelligence has become an intriguing and to some extent helpful factor! We ended the year recently with a team general knowledge quiz, which was unsurprisingly won by Mohsin.

COMPANY CHANGES

Two members of the team got married in our 22-23 financial year. Not to each other! Congratulations to Jenna and Mandy. Also, following a long term period of staffing stability there were two changes in two months. Chay joined us in March and has already shown us the benefit of his sales experience and the need for good quality soundproofing! More recently, Jennifer has left us to explore her university options and we wish her well. A year on, the team are now even more experienced than ever and are genuinely excited for the year ahead, with already lots of great projects in progress. We have also started working on a new website for ourselves which should go live later in 2023. This is usually one of our more interesting and challenging projects! Literally watch this space.