Adrian has developed many websites over the years – mainly for the companies he has founded or co-founded – using HTML, ColdFusion or PHP middleware and databases including Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Some of these old sites, dating back to 1995, take a bit of effort to get going on modern webservers, and he does not have full archival copies of everything he has ever produced.
A selection of the many sites that Adrian has developed is shown below. Several have a particularly strong geographical focus.
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Business Geographics – 1995
The URL geoweb.co.uk was originally used for the Business Geographics Limited (BGL) website. Adrian learnt to design websites in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) in the early 1990s, not long after its creation and release by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989/1990. This website started life any time around 1993. Bathe in the early to…
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UK General Election – 1997
The URL election.co.uk was used for Business Geographics’ coverage of the UK General Election in 1997. Built by a core team of just a handful of people our coverage of events, angled substantially towards an explicitly geographical perspective, garnered millions of hits. The website featured: Adrian wrote about the design of the website for the…
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Business Geographics – 1999
The URL geoweb.co.uk was still in use for the Business Geographics Limited (BGL) website in 1999 but the appearance of the site, and amount of content, had evolved considerably from earlier versions. Still largely written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) the website now featured many more images as well as various database-driven elements, using…
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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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First Virtual
FirstVirtual Group plc was a ‘technical incubator’ established by Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen following their exit from Business Geographics Limited in 2000. The business aimed to take shareholdings in exchange for development work; sweat for equity. The website was one of several designed around this time by Pete McDonagh at Codesign.it, who Adrian had…
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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…
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ExactMedia
ExactMedia Limited was co-founded in 2000 with the involvement of Adrian Tear and Tony Sellen – through their incubator, First Virtual Group plc – and others in the media, public relations and Internet industries. At the dawn of targeted advertising on the Web, ExactMedia incentivised consumers to complete demographic and interests questionnaires while providing a…
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GoCarbonFree
The GoCarbonFree website was an interesting concept designed to incentivise consumers to spend through the site – on a wide range of products including books, fashion, computers, games, health, mobile phones etc. – with rewards in carbon credit points, which could be used to buy and ‘retire’ Gold Standard Carbon Credits or Second Period European…
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HerdManager
Not the prettiest of sites, and more of a What might have been than anything else, HerdManager was partially developed as a demonstration of the sort of data management that is possible with a ColdFusion-based site, a database and a whole lot of Structured Query Language (SQL) statements. The functionality to add new records to…
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HomeHunter
Allegran Advertising Limited was spun out of Allegran Limited in February 2005. The new company was designed to explore non-core business and one of the first concepts to emerge from this development was HomeHunter, soon rechristened QpHomes. Adrian was always rather keep on the HomeHunter concept and created most of the database architecture and programming…
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Ascog Farm
Adrian’s family own Ascog Farm on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. The farm is one of very few that is not owned by the Mount Stuart Trust, the ‘Bute Estate’ which describes itself as ‘the custodian of 87% of the Isle of Bute.’ At Ascog Farm, a particularly windy spot close to the Eastern coast…
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MegaSorcery
Adrian developed the MegaSorcery website when he ran MegaSorcery Limited, the consultancy company he established in late 2007, soon after leaving Allegran Limited. In many ways the MegaSorcery site is a precursor to this website, just without the Research and Teaching strands, which had not yet been developed! Several of the websites listed on the…
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Tyres
The Tyres website is another example of a What might have been concept. The intention, never fully developed in 2008, was to build a B2C website selling car tyres. Behind the scenes, after inputting a tyre size (e.g., 1955517V) the site found prices from a number of suppliers and selected the best value products. The…
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Allt Beag
Allt Beag is a stone-built, Victorian house in the beautiful coastal village of Tighnabruaich, Argyll & Bute. The house was purchased by Adrian and his family in late 2005 and substantially renovated in the months that followed. The website itself dates from around 2009, when attempts were made to rent out Allt Beag for holiday…
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Nutbourne Place
Adrian is fortunate to live at Nutbourne Place, a fine country house in West Sussex with a great pub, The Rising Sun, down the road. The Annexe at Nutbourne Place is available for holiday rentals through Airbnb. The nutbourneplace.com website was put together to highlight useful links to walks and attractions for visitors to the…
