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 website development, including:
- ColdFusion
- Microsoft Active Server Pages
- PHP
- Microsoft SQL Server
- MySQL
- Oracle
- C, C++
Owned 20% by FirstVirtual Group plc the company started offering 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.
Despite the ‘dot com crash’ Lead Hat picked up some good clients and had notable success with:
- 2001 UK General Election – A website developed in partnership with the Daily Telegraph newspaper to cover the UK General Election of that year.
- Wild Bunch – A website and content management system for the film distribution company.
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.