web design news
April
What a busy start to the year! So many new projects at all stages of development incuding several new launches: Thermar Heating, a specialist supplier of renewable energy equipment. Gardeners World, a leading supplier of superior concrete, natural stone and all other hard landscaping products. An email campaign for a leading property developer. And a residential lettings site that is just about to go live.
And I also managed to fit in a two and a half week family trip to Japan.
February
A new site has launched this month. Will Dolphin is a wedding photographer, based in London, who wanted a redesign of his existing site.
January
First of all, Happy New year.
It was nice to take a bit of break over the past couple of weeks, but the new year has brought renewed vigour and already a number of new enquiries. Let's hope that this year is as successful as 2007.
All the best.
Andrew
December
My major new client this month is Conference Care, a venue finding booking agent established in 1995 with a clear vision to deliver a highly personalised service, utilising the latest intelligent technology to meet the needs of the discerning corporate and public sector buyer.
I'll be maintaining and developing their existing website as well as optimising it for better search engine recognition for their key search words and phrases.
November
Another site has now gone live. Look 4 Nurseries.co.uk aims to provide parents with a really useful search engine for the country's best day nurseries. Initially focusing on the West Midlands it will, in the coming months, branch out to incorporate children's nurseries all over the country.
October 2007
I'm glad to report that another site has now gone live: Platinum Executive Cars is a Sutton Coldfield based executive car hire service that caters for both business and private customers. More details and a full portfolio page coming soon...
September 2007
After a hectic summer, a short relaxing holiday and a much-delayed house move, I'm glad to say that cardboard boxes are retreating from my field of vision, my broadband connection has been set up and life is returning to normal. How did people manage before the internet?
New enquires are coming in, on-going projects are nearing completion and another busy autumn is on the cards.
September 2007
The biggest launch of the year thus far has to be SOLE - City College Birmingham's new Student Online Learning Environment. Many months in the making, it provides a total online experience for the 25,000 or so students that pass through the doors of City College each year.
It comprises of four main elements:
- Studinet - the student intranet based on Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007
- MySite - a Facebook-like personal site for students where they can upload documents, photos, videos and all manner of things
- Moodle - the open-source online-learning system
- Student email - thankfully I had little to do with this bit
The amazing thing about SOLE is that all the elements mentioned above, talk and fully integrate with one another and all the other college systems. It was an amazing achievement and took a great deal of hard work by all involved.
August 2007
In addition to the website for the LG Amsterdam Tournament which this year included Ajax, the hosts, Arsenal, Atletico Madrid and Lazio, I also produced the website for the Port of Rotterdam Tournament website, which featured Feyenoord, as the hosts, Liverpool, FC Porto and fast-rising Chinese team Shanghai Shenhua.
July 2007
With the LG Amsterdam Tournament 2007 drawing near, I have been again asked to create some Flash banners for the official Ajax website to promote the tournament. These can be seen rotating with other banners on the Ajax site or here on some screen shots.
The tournament is also being heavily publicised by one of it's main sponsors, Fiat. Again, this can be seen on the official site or here on some screen shots.
June 2007
Working with a wedding car hire business in Sutton Coldfield, we've recently launched the new Celebration Wedding Car website. Their specially selected classic and vintage cars look fantastic and hopefully the website does them justice. From the 1933 Rolls Royce Primrose to the 1973 Daimler, all have been fully restored to the highest standards, including a full mechanical rebuild.
The site is both standards compliant in terms of css and XHTML and conforms to accessibility legislation.
June 2007
I've been playing with Dreamweaver CS 3 just lately and it adds some really nice features - especially the AJAX stuff. I've been using an increasing amount of AJAX in some of my recent sites - those launched and those soon to be launched and this new version of Dreamweaver seems to simplify a lot of the more common application of this technology.
Watch out for them in the near future.
May 2007
Well, Moodle it is and we've launched our new Moodle online-learning system at the college. I'm really happy with it and think it is a great system that is ideal for all manor of organisations.
May has also seen the launch of the LG Amsterdam Tournament 2007 website. This year, as well as the hosts Ajax, we have Arsenal, Atlético Madrid and Lazio.
There has also been another launch this month, but I'm not allowed to publicise it so I'll just allude to it...
Another couple of sites are also about to be launched, so watch out for those in the coming weeks.
April 2007
Finally a news update. The last few months have been very busy. I've been looking into Microsoft's new Sharepoint 2007 as an upgrade to the staff intranet's current Sharepoint 2003 solution at City College as well as introducing it as the student intranet.
Again at City College I've been looking into a replacement for WebCT, the college's virtual learning environment. We were initially looking at Blackboard but have recently been swayed by Moodle. No final decision has yet been made but both systems offer some really great functionality for both colleges or even organisations who want to offer some on-line learning to their staff.
I've also been busy producing podcasts and blogging on a range of things and intend to incorporate more of these new technologies into future projects.
A couple of projects are nearing completion now and will hopefully be going live soon.