Comlongon Rocks 2011

Support Comlongon Rocks 2011 on Facebook. The first of many (it is hoped) annual events for charity fundraising is scheduled for 25th September in the private grounds of Comlongon Castle.

The event is ticket only.

Flip off

We are experimenting with ways of presenting a wedding brochure or album of images on Comlongon Castle gallery using the FlippingBook plug-in for wordpress (2.5 or above). There is a developer/pro licence or a site-by-site licence so could well consider it as an option.

Documentation for NextGen Gallery plug-in...

...could be improved.

Luckily, Vuthy Thorn (a Bostonian living in Los Angeles) has given a good run-down on how to use the NExtGen album and galleries feature within the popular Wordpress plug-in. The explanation and guide also gives some insight to Wordpressers into the 'logic' of the system which aids understanding.

Separate Wordpress sub-pages are created for each gallery within an album using the NextGen interface and the main album display can sit on the parent page.

See the Comlongon Castle wedding photos for a working example.

NextGen Gallery again

The existing Comlongon Castle website image gallery module was struggling to cope with the volume of images so it was time to employ a Wordpress installation with the renowned NextGen gallery plug-in to help organise the photos into themed galleries (AJAX pagination) with slideshow and piclens options.

This is to be achieved using an alternative Comlongon Castle domain as a sort of mirror to the main site so that web visitors can switch between the two resources, with each resource being able to provide either text content and documents, or images.

By extension, this could also be applied to video content - at the moment the Comlongon YouTube channel is in it's infancy but this is the ideal resource to host video content that links back to the main 'outcome' site, where web visitors can complete goals such as make contact or use the wedding calculator to generate a guideline wedding quote.

Optimising wedding photos - a special thanks

Callisti had been provided with a script from the region's Bespoke Coder to run on some of the content managed sites in the portfolio.

Comlongon Castle had taken care to update all their image descriptions (normally ALT tags) throughout the website - no mean feat given the volume of wedding photos the castle venue generates!

The site and database were then backed up and the script was applied. This cycles through all the images in the content folder, copies back-ups for each image e.g. thumb, medium and full-size, into a temporary folder, then renames the image using the description stored in the database, or failing that the image file-name. The new file-names are put back in the original directory and the database updated to account for the change in image URL.

Why? In this case, the original content management system would rename any image file-name during the upload process to a string of digits. This update means all the images now have a keyword relevant title and URL.

Wedding Fare

Callisti is off to enjoy spring equinox at the Comlongon Castle wedding fare, where many wedding service providers and romantic couples will be finding out all about each other.

Weather has been mild and bright so it could be a good opportunity to get some footage (still and motion) of the castle grounds.

 

Comlongon now has a customised twitter presence (in its infancy!)

Wedding considerations

The Comlongon Castle wedding calculator has been updated and restored to display more information on each of the wedding and accommodation options and this is now updated again with the new additions for seat covers (to customise your wedding banquet) and the Honeymoon Lodge.

The castle now has a new Honeymoon Lodge in the castle grounds. This is complete with underfloor heating and is decorated with sculptures by Lucianne Lassalle and interior design by Jason Shackleton.

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.