We recently celebrated our decade-long anniversary!

We’ve come a long way since 2010 and it’s been real pleasure to bring hundreds of websites to life. And, most of all, it’s been a fascinating experience getting to know customers from so many different business sectors.

A brief history

Our beginning actually came around ten years earlier, when our founder (Mike) started designing websites at the end of the 1990s. Web design has clearly evolved a long way in the past two decades, as evidenced by our work with writer and broadcaster Christian Wolmar when his first website launched in 2004 (and remains a loyal customer to Primary Image seventeen years later!).

In the early days, we primarily worked with companies and organisations in the rail and transport sector, which is where Mike had started his career. Whilst we were the first company to specialise in building websites for this market, we soon had enquiries from other types of business. Therefore Primary Image expanded into new areas and quickly grew our client base.

Since then we have serviced clients from a huge variety of businesses, such as accountants, architects, food stores, pubs, training providers, housing developers, marketing agencies, photographers, TV rights, drone operators, and numerous charities and membership organisations, to name just a few.

Though, of course, we’re incredibly thankful that many of our original transport-sector customers have been with us for most of the past decade, and we look forward to continuing our strong association with this sector for many more years to come!

We also took an early decision to specialise in web software called WordPress, which positioned us extremely well, considering it’s now by far the most-used website software in the world! Over the years, we’ve travelled to WordPress conferences across Europe, and even given talks at some of these events.

A year none of us will forget…

This year – 2020 – we would of course normally be attending a lot more web design conferences, but as we all know it’s been a rather strange and difficult year following the Covid-19 pandemic. And for our birthday, which would have been in May (during the first lockdown!) we decided to hold off any celebrations until a later date.

Nevertheless, it’s been our busiest summer ever, with businesses and organisations unsurprisingly having to rely more on their websites than ever before. We’ve helped customers launch e-commerce systems to continue trading, or helped customers replace in-person networking and education events with webinars and video conferences. Clearly we have all had to adapt to this new world very quickly.

It’s been fascinating to see what some of our customers have been doing over recent months, for example:

  • The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), an international website which we designed and host, is full of fascinating economic analysis, including from politicians such as former Chancellor Lord Norman Lamont and former Deputy Prime Minister David Lidington, amongst many other international commentators.

  • A website offering free and paid CV template downloads, which has received in excess of a million visitors a month, and has produced free CVs for NHS and healthcare staff.
  • Several of hospitality clients, such as Butcher & Catch, have introduced online ordering, to help get through what has been an incredibly challenging year for the hospitality sector.
  • For our customers in the rail sector, Rail Forum Midlands have been offering a huge amount of business-related advice to their members, not only regarding Coronavirus but also Brexit too.

And there’s many other examples of the enormous efforts some of our customers have been doing to get through what’s been an extremely challenging year for many businesses and organisations. We can only hope 2021 brings a much brighter and more positive year for everyone.

The future…

In recent times, we have focussed our work much more on our web design and hosting services, and less so on some of our more traditional print and marketing services that we offered in the past. We’ll be revamping our website and brand in the coming months to reflect this.

We’re really pleased to have just launched the first two customer websites on our brand-new website foundation, which will become the default base for all our new website projects we build from 2021. For the past four years we’ve used our own strong and reliable base for the majority of our website projects, but we decided it’s time to completely refresh our code base and ensure we’re keeping up-to-date with the latest technology, which will introduce a brand-new editing interface too. We’ll have more news on this soon, along with some other exciting developments planned for the first half of 2021.

And, finally, a big thanks to you – our customers – for choosing Primary Image to support your websites. It really has been a pleasure to work with all our customers over the past decade. Thank you for putting your trust in us and we’re so grateful for all the kind comments and feedback you’ve given us. We look forward to helping your businesses and organisations prosper over the coming years, and we’ll be delighted to help you in any way we can. Thanks for being with us!