Chris Witham

Creative/Development Director.

LucidSynergy is a natural progression from my many years as a sole trading freelance graphic designer. As I started to grow the business and take on more projects I found myself designing and developing more and more websites whilst still looking after my clients other media requirements.

As the web developed and technologies advanced, clients were increasingly asking to be able to add and revise their own content on their own sites, generally referred to these days as content management or CMS.

This led me to installing and trialling many different systems, some paid for and others as what is known as Open Source, where the software is generally free and there will be a community of talented people all contributing to the development of the system.

This is all excellent but there are some downsides, particularly as most websites tend to grow and require features that traditionally aren’t part of a basic website, things such as:

• e-commerce
• a customer database
• e-mail marketing
• analytics and reporting
• the ability to build custom web applications

There are a some systems out there that for me come close to covering all of these features, but generally you tend to end up cobbling disparate systems together which makes the management of all these features a bit of a nightmare!

One day whilst doing more research on systems I stumbled across Business Catalyst which pretty much ticked all the boxes. Many months after I decided to partner on this system, Adobe had the same idea and bought the company! Good for me and I think good for my clients.

So today the business is made up of designing and developing websites, predominantly on the Adobe Business Catalyst platform because we love it, and looking after our clients graphic design and print requirements as needed.