About Us

We like to build web sites, and then we like to hand them over to the client; the client should be in control of their content, and not be waiting for a developer to amend it.

Although we're based in Hull, we work for clients all over the UK, and in the US too. 

We work mostly (although not exclusively) in ColdFusion, a Java-based web application language and platform from Adobe, one of the world's leading software companies, and we use MySQL as our database. We have our own servers, mirroring changes to customers' sites to two backup servers as they happen, and taking complete snapshots of all sites every night that we keep for a year: we take the security and integrity of our customer's information very seriously!

You could describe the sites we build as swan-like - working seamlessly for the public, with a comprehensive, form driven, back-office to easily maintain them, but with big, complex databases sitting underneath them. Among our features are:

  • image galleries; upload your image once, and we do the rest. Resize it, saturate, tint, crop, watermark, border. All variations of images on this site were taken from a master image, and the various iterations generated on demand programatically. Images can be categorised and keyworded for gallery pages, and incorporated using the Word-like page editor into any content on a site.
  • document libraries; we can allow for pretty much any document format you like. PDF files are scanned and converted to text on upload, to allow for searching, and a thumbnail image of the first page is automatically generated. Documents can be categorised, keyworded, restricted to specific user-levels.
  • sites can be set up with just a single administrator login to look after them, or multiple user- and group-level security, both for the back office, and for the public site. This allows you to restrict certain back office functions to specific people, or groups of people. Similarly, public site pages can be protected by a site login, so only available to all or selected members.
  • we can provide you with designs, either by ourselves or with outside designers we know and trust, or we're happy to work with external designers. Our standard page structure is flexible enough to accomodate pretty much any design, with minimal (and often no) structural page changes required. All site styling in done using CSS, whilst all content is in a database, so design changes are comparatively trivial to implement.
  • e-commerce? No problem. We work with various payment gateways, including PayPal, and can easily incorporate variable shipping charges or other special requirements into the process.

Webhorus have been building web sites for over a decade, and have worked with various organisations:

  • charities, both large and small
  • businesses from FTSE companies to one man bands
  • professional organisations
  • University colleges
  • personal sites - for weddings, recipes, the sublime to the ridiculous

We have wide ranging business knowledge, and can apply our business practice skills to the entire web workflow. We can advise on the use of various social media to boost a client's profile, and can incorporate, for example, Facebook and Twitter connections into web sites.

And most of all, we are approachable. If you call us, you talk to a developer who speaks human, not an account manager or a call centre.