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.

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.

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.

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.

All things Burns

The arts festival in Dumfries and Galloway kicks off on the 22nd May with a group of events celebrating the life and work of Robert Burns who died (and is buried) in Dumfries.

A lot of the press releases from the Arts Festival are picking up on the (debatable) VisitScotland 'Homecoming Scotland' tourism strategy which celebrates the 250th birthday of the Bard.

Tickets for the events can now be bought online at the festival website who recently advertised on the local ITV television channel...