Opening the next gateway

Recently been looking at the Scottish Enterprise "Grow your business" initiatives. One of the challenges of working in the web/IT industry is that teams are often too busy to allow time for a clean development and testing environment pressure.

The now fragmented LEC now has a localised wing called Business Gateway to further spread the quango funding but their website does have a section of funding opportunities for development.

New Year, new thinking. Well, we'll see, but now that the set-up period for Callisti is mostly sorted and administration is ticking over nicely, it's time to look further afield to the world of possibility.

Video lackey

What better way to spend the day than working through a script and shot sequence for a DVD production project.

Getting out and about in the fresh air, meeting people, developing skills, intermittent manual labour, knocking off around 5pm,... sigh, sounds like a proper day's work.

Callisti is producing the Forest Sawmills Health and Safety Training DVD and we hope the new callisti website will feature this soon in the first quarter of next year. The website has been serving a very limited role since it's inception in quarter 3 of 2008 but we will be investing time in a more fitting web presence in the coming weeks.

Christmas presents for boys and girls

It doesn't get more straightforward than this:

Christmas presents for girls and Christmas presents for boys.

We've found that implementing SEO recommendations does actually improve search engine performance. (check Stuart Spray Wildlife Consultancy and JBA Seed Potatoes) We urge all our clients to consider what they are aiming to achieve from their web presence.

MyWishWand on Squidoo

Squidoo allows users to create a 'lens' on a subject that is of interest and has become one of the top 300 US sites with over 700, 000 users.

There is an updateable entry on MyWishWand that provides a review of the services of the Gift Wishlist site. This is part of Callisti's ongoing provision of web 2.0 and review services.

Named in the bible

Interesting fact: Queen of the South is the only football team named in the Bible.

Well, more accurately, the Bible mentions a Queen of the South and there is now a football team that shares this name. It's not like Queen of the South Football Club were around 2,000 years ago and someone thought they should mention his allegiance to the team.

Anyway, they are having trouble with their official website from what I can gather from the various unofficial blogs and supporters' message boards - the official message board is not available, possibly due to bad press.

A lesson for all you web site design companies out there trying to make that step up to professional service delivery: be careful what you promise.

And if you can't deliver what you promised, at least test your development site before you put it live.

SEO on many levels

I spent some of this afternoon thinking about sheep. Not because I'm surrounded by Scotland. The latest client has a number of web sites and the latest online presence is for pedigree Suffolk sheep.

There are some interesting facts to be found when researching for writing web-copy, and it wasn't something I could have predicted last week. Still, trawling through the DEFRA website for information on MV and Scrapie had it's neuronal pleasures...

Some kind of rural filmscape theme was trying to tie itself together in my head since the morning phone call from a travelling developer, wandering wild in hills near Keswick.