Welcome to Fever, a creative design agency based in Colchester with over 50 years combined experience in marketing. 

Working out of Britain’s oldest recorded town, we specialise in mixing bold, innovative ideas with established concepts and practices.

Our co-founders, Ben and Will, have assembled a creative team that gives Fever its unique strength and ability. 

We’ve built our reputation based on the quality of our work and the exceptional service that we deliver. 80% of our business comes through word-of-mouth and referrals – a clear indicator to us that the quality and success of our work is second-to-none, but also a huge motivation to continue ensuring every single project is finished to the highest standard.

From billboards to PPC, advertising can be costly. Making it work for your business is crucial. 

With advertising, placement is as important as content.

The right design in the wrong place is an expensive mistake and a poorly designed advert in the right place can be damaging to your brand.

By working with a specialist creative agency, you can avoid these mishaps and ensure that your advertising provides you with a great return on your investment.

From events to press ads, Fever has the necessary tools to ensure whatever you’re promoting has maximum impact.

Your website is a hugely valuable asset for your business. It’s like a digital storefront, in which you can showcase everything you have to offer to clients, both existing and new.

You can’t ignore how important having an online presence is; most customers will visit your website as part of their decision-making or purchasing process. 

In 2017, the UK was estimated to have 40+ million smartphone users.

That’s a huge chunk of potential app downloads to tap into, and a number that shouldn’t be ignored. 

We design our apps with the user experience centred at the forefront, making sure our apps not only look great but are as user-friendly as possible too.

This comes from our knowledge and deep understanding of user behaviour. We tailor the look and feel of the app to the platform, meaning that our apps look right at home, whether living on iOS or Android.

It’s not just about having an online space though; your web design matters. First impressions count, just as they do face-to-face.

Your website should work on your behalf, selling your product or service even when you’re not the one doing the talking.

When you start attracting customers from Google, your website will be the first introduction to who you are. It needs to have an impact, and quickly.

All this is centred around your brand.  A common misconception is that a brand just consists of a logo and some defined colours, but there’s so much more than that.

Branding could be a smell, a taste or even an associated feeling. It might sound odd but think about it…

When you walk into a bakery, what hits you first – the name of the business outside or the smell of freshly made bread?

There’s a reason why many bigger name brands have their own perfumes scenting their stores – it’s all in the finer details and sensory associations. 

Perhaps you have a well-established and successful business, but your brand identity is feeling tired and outdated. Influences like changing demographics, technology or location may also be reasons to consider updating your identity.

Drive engagement and increase sales with our social media marketing services. As an award-winning digital agency, we can help you achieve your goals by harnessing the power of effective social media marketing.

Whether your goal is to raise brand awareness or increase demand, your social media marketing should be tailored to your target audience and your objectives. Our expert team can help you set goals, build a strategy and deliver effective campaigns that maximise your return on investment.

If you find that every algorithm change fills you with dread and brief spells of staff absence can put your best-laid social media plans into a tailspin, you need an efficient, expert social media marketing partner that can work on your behalf.

A brand is anything that makes up “you”. This includes (but is not limited to) your logo, front choice, colours, image choices, styling and messaging. Your audience will look at each of these and decide whether they resonate with your brand.

Brand identity is everything your audience can see and feel about your brand. The best brands curate their image so that they communicate a consistent message that resonates with their stakeholders.

We build brands that connect to their target audience. From our in-depth kick-off meetings, we can extract the core of your business and turn it into a brand that can be clearly communicated and tell your audience exactly who you are and what you do.

A brand’s identity can be a collection of many things that stimulate our senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell and even taste can be associated with a brand. Your behaviour, environment and the way you communicate contribute to your brand’s identity. With us on board, our creative team will make sure your visual identity triggers all the right emotions and will transform how you look and also how you are perceived.

Specialists in user-centric, product and service-based WordPress websites

We make fast websites for B2B and B2C organisations. Our Colchester development team are experts in WordPress, WooCommerce and whether you are looking for a brochure site to showcase your services or an eCommerce site to run your business from, our team will deliver an optimised site that meets your needs and exceeds your expectations.

WordPress. You might have heard of it, you might not. Either way, this article is going to provide an overview of what it is and who can benefit from it. WordPress is a topic that the team at This is Fever specialise in, and this guide is perfect for anyone interested in learning something from a new perspective.

So, if you’re a WordPress novice who wants to find out more about the content management system powering over 40% of the internet’s websites, then you’re in the right place. However, if you’re an expert looking to re-familiarise yourself with the basics, or see how someone else thinks about WordPress, then you’re also in the right place.

How does WordPress work?

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

WordPress is a content management system, but what does that mean? A content management system (CMS) allows you to separate the content on your website from the design and functionality aspects, allowing for the content to be more easily managed.

This means that a user with less technical experience would be able to create, edit, manage, and publish content, despite not having extensive, specialised knowledge. WordPress is the most widely used content management system, for a variety of reasons.

It has options for free or paid plans, an interface that is user-friendly, a large plugin library, and a huge (and engaged) online community. It is secure and high-performing, while also having fair pricing so that it can be accessible to a wide range of people.

At This is Fever, we utilise WordPress’ capabilities as a CMS to build intuitive, user-friendly websites. We focus on the creation of custom themes and the integration of plugins that will enhance the management of content and the functionality of the site.

What are the basics of installing WordPress?

When WordPress is installed on a server, it sets up the essentials that it requires for the site to function, from the necessary files to the database structure. It creates tables in a database in order to store content and configuration settings. These tables act as a way to store things like content, user information, and settings for the site.

To install WordPress, you can either manually install it from WordPress.org and follow their installation instructions, or you can utilise a one-click installation, as provided by many web hosting services.installations!

What is the WordPress Admin Dashboard?

The management of the backend of each WordPress site is done through the WordPress Admin Dashboard. It is an interface that allows you to manage your website. The Admin Dashboard is used to create, edit, and delete content on your site, such as posts, pages and media.

It gives you the option to browse themes and plugins, as well as install them and customise them to your needs. Speaking of customisation, it also allows you to adjust the settings for things like reading, writing and discussion.

Additionally, you can use the Admin Dashboard to add, edit and assign roles to the people who need to access the backend of your site (e.g. your team). The dashboard is catered to suit a variety of technical abilities, meaning that managing the content on a WordPress site is achievable for the less technically adept.

What are the key features of WordPress?

User-friendly interface

As described above, the WordPress Admin Dashboard is designed to be as user-friendly as possible, meaning that content management can be straightforward for non-technical users. It provides a visual editor to allow you to write and format content without needing to be confident with HTML.

Customisable themes

There are thousands of themes available on WordPress, some of which are free, and some premium. These themes allow you to set your website apart, giving it a unique and professional look. You can install themes easily from either the WordPress collection, or from third-party sites.

The WordPress Customiser allows you to alter themes in order to have them better match with your branding and design preferences. The customiser also offers a live preview of changes, so that you can immediately see how your modifications to colours, fonts, layouts, etc. will look on your site.

Extensive plugin library

There are over 50,000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory, and this means that you can add just about any functionality that you could possibly think of to your website. The can range all the way from advanced e-Commerce solutions like WooCommerce to translation tools like Polylang.

Plugins can be installed and activated from the Admin Dashboard, and the extensive choice available means that you can enhance the capabilities of your site without needing to write masses of custom code.

SEO-friendly

Search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices were taken into account when WordPress was built, and this means that it is far easier to get websites to rank well in search engines. Clean, semantic code is generated by WordPress, and this is easy for search engines to index.

This, combined with the utilisation of plugins like Yoast SEO (which provides high level SEO features such as XML sitemaps, keyword optimisation, and meta tags), can have a great impact on your site’s rankings. You can optimise your content and improve the visibility of your site, therefore driving up organic traffic.

Responsive design

A large number of the themes on WordPress are responsive. What this means is that they are able to automatically adjust to look the best that they can on all devices, so your site can look just as great on a mobile phone as it does on a desktop. As usage of mobile devices increases, it is becoming more important that websites can adapt to suit a variety of screen sizes and resolutions.

Making sure that your website is responsive is important as it improves its accessibility, as well as the fact that it boosts user engagement, reduces bounce rates, and makes it more likely that users will interact with your website content. 

Media management

Uploading, managing and displaying media files on your website is simplified by using WordPress. It has a built-in media library that allows you to upload files using a drag-and-drop feature, as well as organise them into folders.

Images can be directly edited within WordPress, with the ability to crop, resize and rotate images being included. Posts and pages can have media inserted into them with minimal effort, and you can create galleries to show multiple images. A variety of file types are supported by WordPress’ media management system.

Community and support

There is a large and active community connected to WordPress, with a large amount of people contributing to forums, documentation and development. The members of this community provide high levels of support for other members, giving guidance to users at all levels.

There are also a variety of courses, tutorials and blogs that are dedicated to spreading information and insights about all things WordPress. Most of the time, if you have a question about a WordPress project, there’s somebody out there who is willing to help you out.

This is one of the many reasons we use WordPress at This is Fever – we don’t want our clients to be locked into proprietary software that only we can work on!

Security

WordPress puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of security, regularly releasing updates with security patches designed to protect against potential threats by addressing existing vulnerabilities. There are also a number of security plugins (Wordfence, Sucuri, etc.) that can provide advanced features.

These features include firewall protection, malware scanning, and login security, to name a few. You can also make sure that you follow best practices for WordPress security in order to boost the defences of your site. These include updating regularly and using strong passwords.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how to keep your WordPress site well defended, then feel free to check out This is Fever’s article on WordPress security. In the unfortunate event of finding that your WordPress website has been hacked, keep calm and consult our guide on what to do in that situation.

What can you do with WordPress?

Content creation and management

As I touched upon previously, WordPress is packed full of features to help you manage your website content effectively.

I mentioned that the built-in media library is incredibly helpful for adding content to your posts and pages, but what is the difference between the two?

Many businesses are turning to off-the-shelf webpage builders as a quick and affordable way to create a website.

Sadly, due to their limitations, these sites rarely meet the required standards in accessibility and performance. An agency that can code your site to meet your needs will leave you with a high-performing website that can generate leads, automate processes and sell your products and services.

Content Management Systems

Keeping the information on your website up to date is crucial. Unfortunately, lots of marketing professionals we speak to are reliant on their website developers to make even the tiniest of content changes.

With a Content Management System (CMS), adding and changing website content is an easy and efficient process, empowering non-technical staff to keep text and imagery up to date.

If this sounds like something you need, get in touch today to find out more.