Turning the art of web design into a science

About Surfability

Before entering the business world in 2000 our management team worked within large international collaborations, sharing knowledge through intranets, developing software, and analysing complex data sets. In 2001 we formed Surfability Ltd with a vision of a 'golden age of information', and adopted a code of professional conduct, using an extranet website to ensure transparency by enabling our clients to monitor our progress continually and remotely on web development projects.

How Surfability began....

• In February 1999 we successfully completed an architectural redesign of the BaBar collaboration's website which then comprised some 200,000 documents (see BaBar case study).
• In October 2000 our Managing Director, Mark Williams, was awarded an Enterprise Fellowship by the Royal Society of Edinburgh to start up a company offering "web tools and consultancy services". The fellowship was funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.
• In February 2001 the company was incorporated, and began trading in March of that year, specialising in redesign services for information-rich websites.
• In January 2002, Surfability won a DTI Smart award to carry out a nine-month feasibility study of a radical new approach to improving the ease-of-use of large, information-rich websites.
• By 2005 we had finally become profitable after specialising in web accessibility consultancy.

Whatever happened to Surfability?

In 2005 Bailey Teswaine hired our team to build the hosting infrastructure and software environment for their newly acquired Extrasys hosted services division, and we ended up running the business until it was sold on again in 2009. Surfability Ltd was dissolved in 2008, but the team lives on so please contact us if you have a business problem to solve.