Thursday 31 December 2009

Cyprus Villas - I dream of sunshine

The shortest day is behind us, we have feasted and rested. Many of us slid around badly gritted roads and pavements in our bid to congregate with family and friends. Tonight the bells will toll a new year in, and free television channels will broadcast best of and worst of lists and charts of the top 100 whatevers, peppered with product adverts, ad nauseum.




The noughties will give way to the teens (but what about 2010, 2011, and 2012?) as pundits struggle for decade nomenclature now that mass media memes are de rigeur. The sun will get higher in the sky as the days go by and people will start talking about crocuses. Tonight's the night for too much alcohol in this week of excess. Maybe it would be good to read a book or play risk instead.

Oh to be in Cyprus where you can chat on the beach academically about sub-zero temperatures.

Tuesday 22 December 2009

New potatoes

We've been updating the JBA Seed Potatoes website and it now boasts a new design by Kit Allen Ltd. There is some added functionality such as the advanced search and a streamlining of the basket and checkout process.




This site is updated regularly with content and new potato products and information so we hope 2010 will be another good year for the seed potato website.

Thursday 17 December 2009

Sleigh bells ringing

Looking forward to the new year at Callisti - a number of new projects to get stuck into and we're pleased to say our customers have been enjoying a good year. We have a new ecommerce site about to launch but the news of the day is surely the performance of Sledges, the Aviemore based retailer, since we organised professional DotNetNuke hosting and updated the site to a more stable version.

Traffic and sales are escalating wildly, even just the mention of snow on a UK weather forecast has an impact on visitors to the site, and this month online sales have hit a record high in the website's history. The month's not over yet but there may be a tail-off as the last order cut-off for Christmas 2009 delivery approaches.

Historically the sales and visitors rise again in the new year as demand for sledges is very much winter weather dependent and Scotland won't be short of that in the coming months.

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Waney edge boards

Carronbridge Sawmill has its own pressure treatment tank at Carronbridge, Thornhill so timber products can get the green treatment. This is a more eco-friendly method of preservation.




Wordpress is interesting to develop with especially with the wide range of themes and powerful blog (originally) engine driving the resulting websites. Callisti is looking forward to developing and submitting some themes for general use to the wordpress community in the new year.

Sunday 29 November 2009

Hats, Headpieces and Fascinators

This is a wordpress development based on Wayne Connor's sliding door theme to present the bounty of hats and headpieces hand-crafted by Marie Hill Millinery in Lockerbie, Scotland.




Wordpress has recently won awards in 2009 for open source CMS so is pushing old favourites Joomla and Drupal around a bit. The power and simplicity of the wordpress model along with the huge and diverse support network of users and developers make it very flexible and robust with each new version release.

We've taken the wordpress install and customised it to suit the gallery image layout requirements of the client, and tailored the sliding door images to suit the millinery related content.

Sunday 22 November 2009

Edinburgh apartment to let

The estate managers at Galloway House Estate are now providing accommodation in Edinburgh near Stockbridge and the Royal Botanic Gardens.



Callisti assisted with some airbrushing (removing scaffolding and estate agency signs) and annexed the page to the existing site. It's usually advisable to categorise your content under a relevant URL but this is a way of testing the visitor response.

Some other updates throughout the website mean some minor glitches have been sorted e.g. the old Set rs = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") , rs.CursorLocation = adUseClient; previously there were errors when attempting to update some fields in the management section.

Also the design layout was being compromised on certain pages due to the table (tables!) widths and image thumbnails, but this has been resolved.

Monday 16 November 2009

Who's gonna drive you home?

More website transfer action at the weekend means that Callisti now unexpectedly hosts 3 limo websites for Dumfries and Galloway and the Cumbria area.

The Carlisle Pink Hummer has been on the books for a year so the Dumfries Limo and Excalibur Limousine websites effectively make a limo portfolio.

Re: Arthur Pendragon - sometimes you don't have to pull swords from stones, so much as catch them when they fall out.

Scottish Castles

We've now completed working through re-instating hosting provision after being dealt a hand of satellite sites for Comlongon Castle.

Due to the different angles of interest - historic, romantic, panoramic - there are a number of targeted domain names around variations on the Comlongon Castle theme.

Weighing up the balance of SEO costs and benefits will be an ongoing task.

Keeping the outdoor spirit alive

Patties of Dumfries is one of Dumfries and Galloway's established outdoor shops and provides brand name outdoor wear and kit. A timely transfer for Callisti given the recent and impending weather!

We will be working with the team at Patties to develop an effective ecommerce solution for a select range of outdoor wear. News to follow...

Friday 6 November 2009

Caveat Emptor

This lesson is so old the latin has stuck around.

In other words, once you've been sold something, what you thought you'd bought isn't what you actually got - and there's no recourse to the seller.

Callisti thinks this is pretty harsh so takes a more accountable approach to business, after all, the phrase might still be in use but the roman empire collapsed a few thousand moons ago...

Tuesday 3 November 2009

Blog revamp for wishlist news

As a mini-project a few hours were spent playing with the mr moto template on blogger to recreate the likeness of the mywishwand website. Hitherto the blog looked very unbranded but now the style is inkeeping with the generic site design and the mywishwand twitter style.

Some useful tips to get you started on this sort of exercise can be found on various affiliate marketing type sites...

There are also tips here for adding google analytics and various pimp-my-blog techniques.

Monday 2 November 2009

We are underused #2

Callisti gives big thanks to all those who have helped with the migration of websites and email accounts to our hosting services over the past few months.

It's a time consuming job and requires a deal of knowledge, experience and learning to make sure the end-client has an uninterrupted service.

For anyone who feels their technical support job is towards the browner end of the stick be assured that your work is invaluable...

Sunday 1 November 2009

Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival

Callisti is pleased to finally complete the transfer of the DG Arts Festival website and start to manage and maintain the South of Scotland events site.

Lately it's been like running a web removal service; instead of people's possessions being transported from old house to new, it's transferring the hosting service of organisations' websites to a new server. It can be just as stressful!

Comlongon Castle

Having worked on SEO for Comlongon Castle some years ago it's great to get back together with the team to provide a website hosting and management service.

Rather than change for change sake, Callisti aims to streamline the existing web presence and improve the online services for the prestigious Scottish wedding venue. It's a distinctive venue, and with the addition of the new honeymoon lodge, built in a style in-keeping with the historic castle, there are good prospects ahead.

If you're looking for a romantic wedding in a Scottish castle this is well worth checking out.

Allan McNish

Callisti has teamed up with CSS Stellar to provide the web presence for Allan McNish. This is an informative, subscription based website for fans and followers of the successful racing driver who hails from Dumfries and Galloway.

There are some bespoke systems in place on the website which were developed by Peter Graves, a development luminary who Callisti has worked with on several projects to date.

Sledges Upgraded

On 9th September 2009, Joe Brinkman from DotNetNuke Corporation announced that the DotNetNuke 4.x product line had officially reached its End-Of-Life.

The DotNetNuke Corporation is no longer providing support or patches for the 4.x product line, but PowerDNN have assisted Callisti in the upgrade of sledges.co.uk from v4.8.4 to the more stable v4.9.5, and will continue to provide their high level of support.

Callisti will be looking at moving to v5.x next year but will have to check for potential issues with the legacy version on ASPDotNetStoreFront currently employed by the sledges website.

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Wigtown book festival accommodation

Wigtown book festival is an annual event around the end of September/start of October with a rich programme of events over a ten day period.

10 minutes drive away is some self catering cottage accommodation on the old Stewart clan estate, which was sold by the Earl of Galloway in the early 20th century and is now run as an organic dairy farm and Galloway coast holiday venue.

The estate is at Garlieston village, between Whithorn (first Christian settlement in Scotland founded by St. Ninian) and Wigtown. Check out the cottage availability calendar...

Friday 16 October 2009

Holiday accommodation in Cyprus

Callisti is now working with The Villa Group alongside Goldminedesign to assist in SEO for one of the Cyprus villa booking websites.

Cyprus is a popular island resort in the Mediterranean for Western European and Russian holiday-makers so has a wide appeal. It is also a hotly contested online market for traffic and bookings so a multi-channel SEO strategy is the way forward.

Art events in Dumfries and Galloway

Callisti is pleased to have teamed up with Weesleekit to design and build the new Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival website to be ready for the 2010 calendar of events.

The Arts Festival has been running annually in the region for 30 years and is established in the last week in May. Theatre, comedy, classical and folk music, children's events and film are all part of the events running throughout the region at this time.

The site is still in development so more news will follow...

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Sledges

Callisti's sojourn into the world of DotNetNuke was precipitated by a transfer by a former Dodgy Till client and we are happy to take on board the Aviemore-based outdoor shop.

The client has a number of skis, snowboards and sledges websites to server customers in the UK and Europe. Traffic to the sites peak generally in January/February with steady traffic in the winter months and a lower average usage during the summer. Not rocket surgery, really...

We have chosen a US hosting company who specialise in DNN hosting and their support team has been very proactive in servicing us as a new client.

Saturday 26 September 2009

Holiday property repairs and maintenance

Dumfries and Galloway is a region with a variety of rental properties available: there is a significant tourism market for holiday properties and a large rental market with many 2nd home owners making a business out of visitors to the area.

Alongside this there are caravan parks, holiday log cabins, and various holiday park areas.

There are also commercial letting agents that rent general accommodation.

Ewart Property Maintenance provides a repair and maintenance service for a wide range of these properties, from general DIY and maintenance and upkeep, to fitting kitchens and bathrooms.

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Busines Adviser in Angus

Just finished a spot of work for Edinburgh company weareunleaded, run by a successful young entrepreneur. The contract was a basic on-site and off-site SEO for a business adviser in Arbroath.

Interestingly the site was built using the smarty templating system so there were a few initial wobbles as we almost broke the website!

Friday 4 September 2009

Self Catering Log Cabins

One of our website maintenance clients has recently decided to transfer their hosting to Callisti so that all their website management is under one roof.

We are very please to welcome Lochanview on board and hope we can get time off one day to enjoy the hot tub at their lovely self catering log cabins in Kippford, Dumfries and Galloway.

Commercial Vehicle Sales

Clydeside Rentals are now posting commercial vehicles for sale on their website. We're trying out a simple customisation of the wordpress theme to find a friendly way of displaying information, marrying the blog/website information philosophies.

Saturday 22 August 2009

Time-lapse confusion

Timelapse was a video game, this we know. When you type 'timelapse' into google it asks if you meant 'time lapse' but shows results with 'timelapse' and (mainly) 'time-lapse' in the meta title tag. This suggests that 'timelapse' is not really a word in common usage. 'Time lapse' is ambiguous because the definition of usage is loose.

If you enter 'time-lapse' it shows results with all three variations of spelling.

If you enter 'time lapse' it does also but the results vary slightly.

So which keyword should you optimise for?

Well it depends what you mean - semantics!

Some argue that 'time-lapse' refers to time-lapse photography (common usage) - the hyphenation is a way of packaging and individuating the meaning so it becomes shorthand for this filming and photography technique.

'Time lapse' is also used to refer to this but more literally means 'a lapse of time'.

Anyway, for Lobster Pictures we tried to disambiguate time-lapse. Don't know if it will work yet but we'll see...

Friday 14 August 2009

Data Protection Abuse

Seemingly, website customers private information is bought and sold without their consent by unscrupulous web design companies.

(See external article on "How To Run A Company Into The Ground And Accrue Massive Debts In Just One Year" Ed. haha)

Callisti is concerned at recent events in Dumfries and Galloway where customers of a failed company have been given a like-it-or-lump-it block transfer of all their details and website hosting to a Cumbria based company with only 1 week's notice. No mention is made that pays any respect to patiently loyal customers' privacy and information - or that it's been given to strangers - just a link to a video.

Ruthless cherry-picking or brotherly concern? You decide.

Given that it can take 4-6 weeks for even simple domain name transfers out of a debt-ridden mismanaged business, 1 week's notice isn't much use!

Callisti wishes the best of luck to any hard-working web developer who's just had the rug pulled from under them, but this freeing of shackles may be the catalyst to move to a better working environment.

Thursday 6 August 2009

Hunting and Fishing

Some minor but significant updates to the Raehills hunting and fishing website should see the site pages achieve more relevant cataloguing in google's archives.

The page urls have been tweaked to stay relevant to the page content and the verification tag has been updated so that search data for the site can be monitored.

Monday 3 August 2009

Domain forwarding

Sometimes the only way of getting the required keywords in the domain name are URL rewriting and 301 redirects to the sans-keyword domain name.

This SEO tool is useful.

Friday 24 July 2009

Raehills Estate

For those who enjoy a bit of sporting activity, check out Raehills mansion just off the M74 at Junction 15 to Dumfries.

There is shooting, deer stalking and fishing for salmon and sea trout available within the estate grounds and you can stay in the self catering holiday cottages with big gardens to enjoy.

Raehills is the historic seat of the Johnstone Clan and every August the estate hosts the Galloway Country Fair. A must for those of agricultural bent.

Those pesky ghost hunters visited earlier this year but the results were ambiguous...

Thursday 23 July 2009

Do you want fries with that

Imagine finding that one of your fries had a face on it...

Who said a face can launch a thousand ships - what was that all about?

Anyway there is a whole world of planet fry going to happen apparently - who knows what is in store...

Wednesday 22 July 2009

Leith Library Exhibition

Callisti is proud to support local artists at the Edinburgh Festival.

Keith Thompson is exhibiting paintings as part of a Leith Library Exhibition from 20th July - 8th August 2009.

Sweet!

Tuesday 21 July 2009

Blood from a stone

Sometimes in life you have to deal with people or organisations unable to carry out any task with any thoroughness or efficiency, either deliberately or because they are simply incapable.

Latest sites in a long line of rescuees are:

Motors Local - a resource for buying and selling cars in South West Scotland. This also carries pages for Troqueer Garage and Top Ten Models (phew!)

Dumfries Bed and Breakfast - currently a simple contact marketing poster for the Abarglen Bed and Breakfast in Dumfries but with designs to become a more useful resource for tourism in the region.

Saturday 18 July 2009

Fancy an Italian?

When Ivano first arrived in Scotland over 20 years ago from The Tuscan town of Lucca, he brought with him a knowledge of Tuscan Italian cuisine and a skill for home made cooking.

Little did he realise that he was to meet a man from Callisti through forces unknown and end up with a website to help with the marketing of the already successful Italian food take away business in Dumfries.

Callisti can fervently recommend the Penne Speciale, the Pollo Salsa Rosa (or Surfer Rosa as we sometimes call it in our throwback ways), and the pizza bases. Pizza eaters may know what this means.

They also have a holiday home in Tuscany that is available to rent should you ever need to visit North West Italy and the home of the renaissance in Florence or whatever...

Monday 13 July 2009

External Links

One of the strategies of SEO is building a relevant network of external links to the target website(s). Now, how to do this without being spammy?

A genuine strategy is to optimise the site in question, submit it to the relevant engines, find related sites and cultivate links from them, build supplementary sites on different servers and link from them, engage in social networking stimulating interest and discussion, make use of all the different search channels (images, local business listing, video, news) and generate relevant and timely press releases as appropriate.

You can then embark on a paid strategy using the major search engine sponsored link programmes but this is best used in tandem with organic SEO as it disappears as quickly as it appears.

But the genuine strategy often seems like pissing in the wind unless you can get access to a strong existing link source. How to do this? Answers on a blogcard please...

Thursday 9 July 2009

All things Tesla

Remember Command and Conquer? Tiberian Sun? I used to love getting a base built up with an matrix of Tesla Coils (and several power stations) to take out incoming hostiles...

Also O.M.D. had a song called Tesla Girls - I always wondered what that was about when I was younger...

Friday 26 June 2009

Online shopping for busy parents

Since the last round of development updates, MyWishWand is now easier to use, and works by letting you create and share gift wishlists - normally by parents for children.

We are currently building up the adwords campaign to target specific landing pages so that visitors can navigate quickly to what they're looking for.

If you're stuck for gift ideas there's now a wider selection of lists for events such as baby showers and christenings. The gift-finder tool is another way you can find the "perfect gift" – based on the recipients age, gender and interests.

Members now get access to money-saving offers from retailers including Graham and Greene, Early Learning Centre, Boden, John Lewis, Waterstones, etc.

The celebrity approvals so far have come from Jools Oliver and Mr & Mrs Johnny Vaughan and there have been write ups in Daily Candy Kids, Country & Town House magazine, Junior and Practical Parenting as well as YummyMummyJobs.

Thursday 25 June 2009

Personal Health and Fitness

This is a litmus test for an Edinburgh-based Personal Health Screening provider. The market is a mixture of employers requiring employee health checks and private individuals needing professional health and fitness testing and advice.

Wednesday 24 June 2009

Emotional Freedom

The Delves personal training website finally went live today after a lot of finishing touches. Callisti played a key role in the organic SEO strategy for this site starting with the initial design and development.

The site offers training courses for Managing Workplace Stress, EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques, NLP for practitioners, and many other personal and corporate courses which you can book online.

When to use Adwords as SEM

We recently got a number of requests for online partnerships from adwords-based URLs so it seemed appropriate to add more detail on what our position is towards using sponsored links as part of a search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.

Saturday 20 June 2009

Florida Holiday Villa for the family

The Clydeside Rentals website now has the holiday accommodation aspect of the business included.

Interesting mixture of florida resort images and tipping trailers but the holiday rental side of things is sectioned off so that the holiday cottages in Scotland and the family villa in the Tuscan Hills resort, Davenport, Florida USA, have their own pages.

One aspect of the design template is that sub page menus aren't obvious so it doesn't allow for a page heirarchy without hacking.

Tuesday 16 June 2009

Trailer Hire in Scotland

One of the SEO challenges we face is focussing a website by domain name to the subject area it contains. The interesting case of Clydeside Rentals is that the company rent both trailers and tractor units for commercial hire, as well as holiday home rentals both in Scotland and Florida.

The domain would support both to some extent but it means the website will be fish and fowl. I would normally recommend that each theme is developed as a distinct web entity as it makes more sense to structure information this way - it's rumoured that categorical distinctions are relevant to large search engine indexing.

Monday 15 June 2009

Galloway Tourism

South West Scotland is characterised by rolling uplands, cattle and dairy farming, sheep farming and forestation. The ubiquitous industry is tourism which takes advantage of natural features and wildlife.

Inland there are mountain bike trails (7 stanes), hill walking tracks (Southern Upland Way), and many historical monuments, most notably relating to Robert the Bruce (Earl of Carrick and Galloway).

On the coastline, which goes from the Solway estuary at Gretna (the border between Scotland and England), along past Auchencairn Bay (Dalbeattie), Kirkcudbright Bay, Whithorn Bay, Luce Bay and Portpatrick (on that iconic peninsula associated with the ports of Stranraer and Cairnryan), there are protected environments for breeds of birds such as at Caerlaverock, and many small sailing and boating clubs dotted along the beaches and bays.

Given that much of the visiting trade to the region is tourism-related, and latterly location-related (such as film companies requiring rural landscapes), there are many small accommodation providers that rely on internet marketing.

The latest requiring Callisti services have been the Annandale Arms Hotel in Moffat and Galloway House Estate in Garlieston, each being established accommodation providers in the region. We carry out SEO work for such websites as well as basic web design and content updates to ensure they keep getting found.

Sunday 7 June 2009

Rudimentary SEO

We have placed this handy guide to SEO on the Callisti website. It's criminal that the site update isn't finished yet but clients come first :)

A Hotel in Moffat

We have now improved the image SEO facility for the Annandale Arms Hotel in Moffat. The image upload feature allows for the original image filename to be preserved as the image is resized during thumbnail creation on the server.

There are some other SEO strategies we'd like to put in place but it may require a change in the hosting service.

Thursday 4 June 2009

European elections

Who you vote for is a matter for your own conscience. That said, I've been doing some work on the Mike Russell MSP website, based on a nice Atahualpa theme. The theme administration is a class above so well worth checking out...

One feature of the site is RSS feeds for Mike's voting history and his Parliamentary Questions which took a bit of fiddling to create successfully using a combination of feed43.com, publicwhip.org.uk, theyworkforyou.com and some feed-building tips.

It's reassuring to know that the information on our elected representatives is there but you have to go data mining for the more juicy stuff.

Tip for the day: always remember to sort out your application pools in IIS before tearing your hair out with URL rewriting on a Windows server.

Sunday 31 May 2009

Web analytics vs people

Callisti loves this blog.

If you want good insight in to web analytics, return on investment (ROI), organisational challenges facing clients and how to manage data, this is yer man.

Wednesday 27 May 2009

A Scottish Perspective

We've been playing around with a newspaper style blog for the Dumfries SNP (Scottish National Party) website. The site is aimed at providing a platform for highlighting local issues in the town and region to engage the residents of the area.

It can also act as an advocate for the wishes of the community by allowing contributions from interested readers.

Still some work to be done on the blog design to incorporate video footage, clips and more information...

Friday 22 May 2009

Late crop summer potatoes

JBA Seed Potato customers should now have received the first potato newsletter with information on ensuring a healthy crop over the summer.

There are also autumn and winter harvest potatoes which can be planted in July in time for Christmas.

The newsletter is a simple interface in the management section of the website which draws from subscribers to the newsletter (who also received discount voucher to buy potatoes) and has a simple unsubscribe feature to ensure that those who prefer not to receive such things can opt out.

There were over a thousand recipients to the first e-mailshot which shows just how far the website has come since the ecommerce site launched.

Tuesday 19 May 2009

We are illuminated

Well it took a couple of days longer than we thought but that allowed for some final feedback and tweaks to improve the eProjectorLamps website functionality.


This is a portfolio design so the web design and web development team Callisti brought together for this project should be proud. Lots of use of jquery and vb script, moving away from the previous php incarnation, have made this into a more direct, search based ecommerce site.

A nice feature is the credit account option for public service bodies, schools, colleges and government offices so that they can be part of the eprocurement scheme for local authorities when buying projector lamps and replacement bulbs online.

All the projector manufacturers and models, e.g. Epson Cinema 200 lamp for projectors, can be found using the home page search filter or by navigating using the 'more from this manufacturer' links. You can also enter the projector lamp part code or model number to find the bulb you are looking for.