Most of the tasks and activities that go into making a great website intersect and overlap, but our work can be broadly described as falling into the following groups of activities. Hopefully, this way of grouping what we do will be useful to new customers – that could be you.
If you still have queries, you might find the answers on our FAQ page, while you’ll find some examples of our work on our Portfolio page.
Hazel Flynn writes at any length from column to book and covers the style spectrum, from straight reporting and profiles to humour and opinion pieces. She understands the art of accurate, speedy research and the skill of writing text for others that sounds like their own words.
She is the author of 10 books and offers high-level writing and structural editing services for publishing, media and corporate clients. As an author she specialises in ghost/co-writing and writing popular history for publishers including Pan Macmillan, HarperCollins and Allen & Unwin. She has until recently been a consulting editor, columnist and feature writer for Reader’s Digest Australia Australia as well as the magazine’s editions in New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Pakistan.
Previously Non-Fiction Publisher at Random House Australia and Commissioning Editor at Murdoch Books, Hazel is also deeply experienced in magazine editing, web copywriting, media liaison and radio broadcasting (from her time as producer and broadcaster at ABC Radio).
Through Hazel, Flyman Partners offers unparalleled expertise in editing and writing on virtually any subject for any audience in any format.
You can find out more about Hazel’s skills and experience at her website.
Ricky Onsman has a proven track record in designing and coding websites that are not only good looking, well structured, optimised for search engines, content-rich, user friendly, device-responsive and cross-browser compatible, but also valid, semantic, standards-compliant, well structured, accessible – and successful.
Over the last 23 years, he has designed and built more than 220 websites – with a surprising number of the older sites still working and using his design. Ricky maintains a select portfolio of long term clients, several of whom have been with him for more than 10 years. His work for some clients includes every aspect of an effective web presence, leading to a strong skillbase in disciplines such as content marketing, social media, user research and search engine optimisation, which are not often found alongside high level web design and development skills.
While Ricky’s technical facility extends to understanding and working with most established and emerging web technology, his hands-on work for most clients is with WordPress, which allows him to handcraft themes to his own visual designs and create suites of functional tools to meet each client’s individual needs. The results of his one-man multi-disciplinary artisanal approach have been described as being like custom-made bespoke suits as opposed to off-the-shelf.
Ricky also currently manages Communications & Marketing for two of Australia’s best known and respected web tech conference organisers, Web Directions and UX Australia. He has previously been Managing Editor at tech publisher SitePoint, Digital Director for magazine Anne Summers Reports, Managing Content Editor at Access iQ and an Accessibility Researcher at Simply Accessible. He is a former President of the Web Industry Professionals Association, and a former Committee member of the Australian Web Industry Association.
You can find out more about Ricky’s skills, experience and recent work at his website.
Flyman Partners generally designs and builds websites that our clients can manage themselves, but we’re also often asked to take on a long term content management role, sometimes as part of a continuing brief to provide ongoing technical support and site maintenance.
The content management, technical support and site maintenance services we provide were evolved to meet the needs of our web design clients, from hourly rates on an as-needed basis to discounted annual maintenance agreements covering multiple sites, but we do also extend these services to websites we didn’t build, at negotiable rates.
About 80% of our clients have WordPress websites, but we have experience with managing Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine, Perch and static HTML websites.
Contact us now about our content management and site maintenance services.
Our clients sometimes approach us to provide additional services that are logical extensions of what we’ve already done for them and require us to branch out from our core activities. Many of these have been one-off, but some have turned into the services we describe as special projects.
At Flyman Partners we are, as a matter of course, committed to meeting the needs of people with disabilities in the way we design and build new websites and manage the content that populates them. As both legislation and community standards demand greater web accessibility, clients come to us seeking ways to make older websites more accessible.
We’re fortunate that Ricky has acquired an expert understanding of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 – and how to implement them.
Hazel has a great deal of experience working with first-time authors and is sometimes called on by publishers to mentor an author as they work to make a manuscript ready for publication. This can extend from conveying a clear understanding of how book publishing actually works, the rewards and compensation that can be realistically expected, the technical issues that writers have to wrestle with and how an author can develop a distinctive voice in their work.
Hazel is also experienced at holding workshops for writers, including sold out events at several Sydney Writers Festivals.
Over the years, we have developed serious expertise in the fields of electronic direct marketing and continuing consumer engagement through email newsletters. Our clients’ experiences show that they work – when they’re done well.
We provide specialised services in the design, writing, editing, formatting and distribution of email newsletters that are received and acted on by opt-in subscribers, including the management of secure subscriber databases at a highly sophisticated level.
While we can and do use stand-alone client-side and server-side mailing software, we prefer and recommend using Campaign Monitor.
Hazel has acquired an enviable reputation for taking on book manuscripts that have become bogged down or blocked in some way, and getting them back on the path to successful publication.
Drawing on years of working effectively with both experienced and inexperienced authors, as well as a deep understanding of the work of editors and publishers, Hazel is known and appreciated within the book industry for her manuscript rescue skills – on time and within budget – even though she often cannot be publicly credited.
Due to the cost, this service is practical only for professional publishers and editors.
In recent years, we have had a number of requests to redesign older websites to ensure that content displays appropriately on the increasingly complex range of devices, screen sizes, resolutions, operating software and browsers used to access the web.
Our experience has been that some websites work better when media queries and the principles of responsive web design are used to change how all web content is displayed, while some benefit more from having a separate mobile site formatted to suit devices like mobile phones and tablets.
We’ve successfully undertaken projects that retained the existing design to make it responsive and others that introduced a new mobile-friendly design.
Not unreasonably regarded with some disdain because of some short-sighted, ill-informed and outright abusive practitioners, the reality is that is important for any website owner to consider how they can best attract users who will get the most out of their site.
SEO does not require arcane or underhand practices that fail in the long run anyway – it does require an understanding of how search engines index content and how people use search to find the content they want and need.
We’d be happy to demonstrate the very positive results we’ve achieved for our clients.
Within the broad context of the web as a medium, outlets like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and others have created a subset of social media, channels through which users themselves share content and interact with it. This represents an opportunity to engage with communities from a local to a global scale. They each have their quirks, their advantages, limitations and risks.
Because we tend to know our clients very well, we have had considerable success helping them to use social media effectively, both through hands-on management on our clients’ behalf and by training and supporting our clients to develop and carry out their own social media strategies.
Contact us now about our special project services.