Founded by Adrian Marshall in 2000 and 20% owned by FirstVirtual Group plc, Lead Hat Limited started offering database-driven web development services in 2000, just a few months before the ‘dot com crash’ of March to October that year partially wiped out demand for its services.
Lead Hat Limited was a full service Internet agency providing everything from server hosting through to brand management, system design and implementation.
Despite the ‘dot com crash’ Lead Hat picked up some good clients and had notable success with the 2001 UK General Election website, a fine arts auction website and a database-driven website for film distributors Wild Bunch.
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UK General Election – 2001
The 2001 United Kingdom General Election was held on Thursday 7 June 2001. Having produced a ground-breaking website for the 1997 UK General Election, Adrian and his colleagues were keen to repeat the exercise for 2001. Some of the data from 1997 could be re-used in the 2001 website, e.g., to calculate swings, while a…
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LeadHat
Lead Hat Limited offered Internet and Web consultancy, design, hosting and web applications development. The website was one of several designed around this time by Pete McDonagh at Codesign.it, who Adrian had met while working on the 2000 London Election project. With a strong technical offering, Lead Hat offered a number of computing technologies for…
In 2002, having had a lean time in the web development services business, Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen abandoned this sector in favour of developing consumer websites of their own.
The new business, Allegran Limited – founded in 2002, went on to develop lottery, dating and property websites. It was sold to Daily Mail General Holdings three years later in an eight figure deal.