QWeb in a nutshell
QWeb Ltd is an award winning web and game development agency in Leeds, England.
Established in February 2013, we've designed and built websites and mobile apps for hundreds of clients and in 2018 we ventured into games development.
We've helped new businesses by designing their logo and brand identity, building and hosting their website, and by supporting them with their new venture.
We've impressed big brands by providing them with design and development services that exceed expectations and by building complex systems that other agencies said weren't feasible.
And we've supported dozens of other design agencies by building the products that they've conceptualised with their clients, however challenging they are.
Home to both the Egg Basket ecommerce framework and the Qiso isometric game engine, we're equally passionate about building websites and games. We're working hard to adapt our vast amount of web design experience to create intuitive libraries for game developers, and great games for players. Alongside games, we continue to be a web development agency and offer website design and development, hosting, marketing, and branding services.
Though we specialise in ecommerce, we have a pool of highly skilled designers and developers with experience in a variety of industries and we have yet to receive a project request that we can't passionately fulfill.
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How we got here
QWeb was incorporated in 2013 but our story goes back a little further than that. Way back to 1996 in fact, when our founder, Ric, wrote his first line of code.
Ric was born in 1986, slap bang in the middle of the video gaming boom and just before home Internet took off. His mother owned two ZX Spectrums, a Commodore 64, and an MSX, and had spent her pregnancy learning to code, so his future was pretty inevitable really.
In 1996, at the age of 10, Ric had become more interested in how games were created than in actually playing them, so his mother sat him down with Q-BASIC and taught him to output text to the screen. From that day on, almost all of his time went into programming, in various languages and on various platforms. When not programming, he was playing games, and when playing games he'd be trying to figure out how each component worked.
In 2001 after 5 years of game and software development, Ric began to migrate towards website development, creating really small, static web pages. By this time he was active in online programming groups and one of his acquaintances introduced him to PHP, a language for creating dynamic web pages. PHP combined all of the elements Ric liked from the various game and software programming languages he'd learned over the years with the ability to dynamically generate a page on the Internet that everybody could see and interact with immediately, rather than a piece of software that needed distributing to users before they could try it. For the first time in 5 years of programming, Ric could actually show off the work he was proud of to the entire world.
Aged 18, in 2004, Ric put his dream of becoming a games programmer on hold and started his career as a web developer. He freelanced until 2010, then joined a web design agency, technically as a junior developer but already with 9 years web development experience and 14 years programming experience. Within 3 years, he became the lead developer for that agency and was building a network of amazing designers and developers.
In 2006 Ric met Kate, a freelance accessibility consultant who worked to ensure websites could be used by anyone, including deaf, blind and differently abled users. Her clients ranged from new startups to government contracts. Kate's knowledge of accessibilty, as well as her business administration experience, complimented Ric's programming skills and they began to collaborate on website projects.
In February 2013, Ric and Kate incorporated QWeb Ltd, pulling together their combined 17 years of programming experience, 21 years of web development experience, and an amazing network of creatives into a new business, an agency striving for perfection from an ethical foundation. The people behind QWeb are web geeks, talented designers and developers, server technicians, search engine optimisers, print specialists, and gamers. We're all passionate about some part of this industry and we're all really, really good at what we do. We're not a public company so we don't have shareholders to please, and our clients aren't just another account to us - we want to get to know you, and share our expertise with you so that your business can thrive.
In 2017 Ric returned to his roots as a game programmer and in 2018 we rebranded to become a web and game development agency, no longer just here to build websites. We're still primarily a web agency and most of our network consists of web people, but we're working really hard to expand our vast amounts of programming experience into great games and game development tools and we'd absolutely love to hear from you if you have an idea for a game you've always wanted to make. Our dream is to bring back the styles of games released during the 80s and 90s but we're not afraid to try our hand at any style or genre.
This is just the beginning for us. If you have a project that you want us to get stuck into now, fantastic - get in touch right away. If not, please follow us on our social networks, particularly our Youtube channel, and look out for our upcoming games.