Nottingham Technology Ventures. A first website, and a directory of the University’s spin-outs.

In May 2018 Nottingham Technology Ventures’ chief executive asked whether we could build websites for two companies at once. One was Locate Therapeutics, a University of Nottingham spin-out. The other was Nottingham Technology Ventures itself, which didn’t have a website: what there was about it lived on a page of the University’s own site.

Locate went first (there’s more about that below). That October we met the team at the Ingenuity Centre, the company’s home on the University of Nottingham Innovation Park, and two days later sent our proposal: a website of its own, away from the University’s site, built around a directory of the spin-outs. The go-ahead came the next day, with one request: something to show at an important meeting on 5 November.

First, it needed an address. The short ones were taken, so the proposal set out what was free, and why we’d pass on most of it:

1. The initialsTaken as .com addresses, with hyphens or without
2. nt-ventures.comFree, but a hyphen is a disadvantage
3. notttechventures.comFree, but three t’s in a row are hard to read
4. nottinghamspinouts.comFree, but it isn’t the company’s name
5. nottingham​techventures​.comLonger than most, but the company’s name in full

It’s longer than most web addresses, but it says exactly who the company is, and it matches how the University’s brand team would later ask for the name to be written: always in full. We registered the .com and the .co.uk that week, and the .co.uk sends visitors on to the .com.

We planned the site page by page in a shared document, with our notes and the team’s answers side by side. The design brief was short: a minimal, modern design with plenty of white space, only a few links in the menu, and more photos of the people behind the spin-outs, not just their technology. The Ingenuity Centre, the ring-shaped building the company works from, got a line of its own in our notes: “This is an impressive building which needs to be shown off on the website.”

At the heart of the site is the directory. Every company has a page built from the same simple form: its name and a short summary, a main photo and its logo, the year it was founded and the year the University first invested, its sector and the faculty it came from, a profile, a quote, a gallery and a link to its own website. Its news appears on the page by itself.

The four sector pages and the Exits page are drawn from the same records, and the portfolio can be filtered by sector, so a company added once appears everywhere it should. Everything else we kept simple, with no phone links or brochures to download, because, as we put it at the time, “The site is more for information than for users to carry out any specific actions.”

Our first design opened with a full-width photo of a featured spin-out, with the company’s name set in plain type for a logo. In January 2019 the site went to the board, behind a password, and the board were “really pleased”.

Then the University’s brand team went through it, and the site took on the University’s look: its header and footer on every page, the composite logo with the University’s castle, its house style (sentence case, no ampersands), square buttons with a chevron to match the brand’s shapes, and the company’s name written in full. On the home page, the logo and the menu moved off the photo and onto a white bar above it.

Some things stayed, for good reasons. White text over photographs needs care, and we had planned for it:

After a final round of checks with the University, the password came off on Wednesday 20 March 2019. That week we trained the team, and the site was theirs to run.

From the start, the plan was for Nottingham Technology Ventures to run the site day to day. In launch week we wrote a manual, with short how-to videos, and kept it up to date as the site grew. The team adds companies, people and news itself, and in 2019 we set up accounts for its PR agency, Baker Baird, so it could publish stories too. By April, the team was publishing its own news:

The rest is ours. We look after the hosting, the updates, the backups and the security, and in 2019 we set up the company’s listings on Google, Bing and Apple Maps, with the same name, address and description everywhere, so it shows up properly in search results and on maps. The annual reports went up as they were published, in 2021 and 2022.

In 2022 the annual report linked to short films about four spin-outs, made by Baker Baird: Cheesecake Energy (now Keep Energy Systems), Neurotherapeutics (now Neupulse), NuVision Biotherapies and Promethean Particles. We prepared the films for the web and put each one on its company’s page, so the links in the report went straight to them. It was an idea from our first planning notes in 2018: “These could be video interviews.”

Nottingham Technology Ventures sits at the centre of a lot of young companies, and from the start it has introduced us to some of them. The first was in that email of May 2018. Locate Therapeutics’ new website went live on 2 October 2018; three days later the company chose its new logo from our designs, and on 16 October it announced its new name, Locate Bio, on the new site.

More followed, each with a short email: NuVision Biotherapies in 2018, whose new website we launched in 2021; TextureJet in 2019, a brand-new spin-out that needed its first website; and in January 2021, Taraz Metrology, for a new logo and website, and a company then called Neurotherapeutics, for which we did the naming, the brand and the first website. Today it’s Neupulse.

In May 2022 the introduction came from Dr Alice MacGowan, then the company’s Life Sciences Executive and now its chief executive:

The new company was Alevin Therapeutics, and a logo, a brand and a website followed that summer. One introduction even led to another: through Taraz we also met Zayndu, a Loughborough University spin-out, later in 2021.

Seven and a half years after launch, it’s still the same site, and the plan from 2018 still runs it: featured spin-outs at the top of the home page, animated figures, the four sectors, the people, the exits, the portfolio and the latest news. The portfolio has grown from 18 companies at launch to 44 active spin-outs, and the directory holds 37 company pages, current spin-outs and exits, each one added by the team through the same form.

We keep WordPress and its plugins up to date, and the site fast and secure, so the team can get on with the work its chief executive describes: