Event decor hire

This is a recent customised Wordpress CMS website for a Dumfries-based event decor hire company.

The wordpress installation is based on a customised theme in line with the existing printed marketing materials of Tantrum Events.

The image galleries are controlled using the NextGen Gallery plug-in which also allow for the jwplayer slideshow effect based on random gallery images.

The functions.php file for the theme has been updated to use the post thumbnail feature present in Wordpress 2.9 onwards. More details...

Thornhill blues fundraiser and website

After a mayday fundraising blues jam evening in Thornhill the Thornhill Blues event is up and running for next year.

Tickets were sold out for the event at Thornhill Bowling Club and the large support augurs well for the official opening next year.

The headlining blues bands expected to play at the 2011 festival are listed on the website with links to their respective youtube and myspace pages.

Pay-as-you-go e-marketing

Finally, a sensible pay-as-you-go e-marketing service!

Callisti was in contact with Contact Multimedia's team in Glasgow and it was a breath of fresh air knowing that small organisations that need intermittent e-marketing services don't have to sign up to a monthly contract or get charged hefty set-up fees.

The user interface is very straightforward and any imported email lists are checked externally to ensure the email addresses are recent, not spammy, and that the end client has a proper opt-in/opt-out policy for subscribers.

The reporting system is easier to grasp and there is ready reckoner guide for what the average response is to e-marketing campaigns depending on the nature of your organisation.

Tickets now on sale

Tickets are now on sale for the 2010 Arts Festival in Dumfries and Galloway. The organisation uses a third party booking system called "The Booth" which allows visitors to book from an online allocation of seats at events.

Most of the ticket sales are still available using the ticket hotline number (01387 253383) which is handy for many of the events being run in partnership with other local organisations and venues.

Part of the event itinerary during the festival is the "Fringe" which lists some of the events on during the period of the festival - these are listed as part of a wider range of events being hosted in the region during the arts festival.

Planting potatoes - news

This won't win any design awards but is an informative website - some fooling about with Google news displays on seed potatoes (Note: always be very specific about the search terms you want the news for...)

The client has been providing content covering a range of methods for growing potatoes in space-restricted areas - the use of old tyres is a favourite.

html5

Ah. New standards. What do you think the worst browser will be?

Vindicated

The Cyprus Holiday Villa market is pretty saturated. A Callisti client had challenged us with the task of building up quality web traffic for a young website to attract a share of the Cyprus holiday online booking market.

The challenge involved using only "white hat SEO" techniques, no Google Adwords or sponsored links, and work within a tight budget on a "shot to nothing" basis. The work is now paying off :)

After investing time in reducing pagerank leakage, making more friendly URLs, optimising meta tags, sourcing website and blog links from external and relevant websites, utilising a rich Flickr photostream, and tweeting when appropriate, etc., the bookings are now starting to come.

A strange feeling of satisfaction results.

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.

Itsh a compromizhe

This has been on the back-burner for a while. Initially the site was transferred into Callisti's website hosting service toward the end of last year. The vision was to develop a Dr Martens focussed ecommerce site as these products seemed to perform well online, while reducing the in-shop administrative burden of monitoring and updating hundreds or thousands of products.

The site was developed for Christmas 2009 but hit a snag with Dr Martens (who advised against the particular design and domain name we'd settled on.) So what we have done is used a Zen Cart ecommerce engine to replace the previous incarnation of CubeCart and merged the first new build structure into the existing Outdoor Spirit design.

The outdoor-spirit.co.uk has a domain history which can be used and is also familiar to existing customers. More subsidiary work is being done to build around the Outdoor Spirit brand using content channels such as Youtube, a Blog presence, and other linked entities to help promote and review products and provide relevant outdoor activity feedback to help inform website visitors.

Other initiatives such as the Gap Year travel kit have helped package outdoor equipment into one stop shop kits that offer savings to customers and ease of in-shop administration.

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!)

Get your story straight

Work has started on The Dead Tree Press initiative to encourage a more balanced reporting of the events and goings-on in Dumfries and Galloway and beyond.

Writers are invited to submit content and articles, cartoons, illustrations, etc., that have a bearing on local, regional and national issues from a local perspective.

The web presence is still in it's formative stage and is open to flexible development to suit the needs of the readership and contributors alike.

Comments welcome!

Wedding balloons

The "wedding industry" has a diverse marketplace given the sophistication and customisation desired by modern lovers who want a perfect day that's just right for them.

Dumfries and Galloway is home to the famous UK wedding capital, Gretna Green - internationally renowned throughout history for being perched on the Scotland-England border. Callisti is now hosting the Balloons for All website which outlines the range of decorative services available to dress any wedding venue and we aim to help the website improve in the coming year.

Learning disabilities consultancy

As part of the foray into using Wordpress as CMS we are now setting up basic hosting services with the latest version of Wordpress installed so that clients can start from scratch and add all their own content, images and wordpress themes.

We also set up the .htaccess so that permalinks work from the off and encourage an xml sitemap generator to help with basic SEO.

The latest of these is BeaconLearningDisabilitiesConsultancy, a lengthy URL but descriptive all the same. This is currently being edited and transformed by the client.

Fence Post

Callisti is now set up to host Allan Smith Fencing, a regional service in Dumfries and Galloway for fencing work and poles, crash barriers and sleepers.

The website may be getting a spring clean with partnership providers Communications Technology Limited.

Out of the blue and into the black

Work is now starting on the Thornhill Blues website for the Dumfries and Galloway blues festival to be held in 2011. The organisation are bringing well-known blues bands to Thornhill over the holiday weekend in spring so fans that follow the blue trail will have a new date in their calendar.

The organisation is keen to promote its presence on facebook and myspace.

2010 Arts Festival in Dumfries and Galloway

Events for the 2010 arts festival held around Dumfries and Galloway at the end of May are now being listed on the new website.

Callisti teamed up with Weesleekit to develop the new site in time for the festival brochure release and other strategic marketing for the events. There will be a few further developments to the site when more content is provided for us to work with so we can keep improving every year.

This website was built using a very customised Wordpress install as the basis for the CMS. Playing with Custom Fields is fun.

Italian Deli

Just back from a training session with the Ivanos Italian team in Dumfries. Lovely training environment with plenty of home-made cappuccino going around!

The new refurbished premises will be opening in February 2010 and will have a subway-style lunchtime deli option in addition to the evening menu and Ivano's specials. Yum yum.

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.

Fasthosts dedicated servers

Fasthosts dedicated servers response early this morning after a number of dedicated servers suddenly went down around 10pm last night:

We have been experiencing a connectivity issue which caused intermittent or no availability of some services.

The issue was known to have impacted some customers access to email and hosting services and dedicated servers, as well as causing our support phonelines and system status pages to be unavailable for a short period.

We have now restored all services to normal levels.

We thank you for your patience and understanding and will update our system status pages with further information as soon as we can.

If you are still experiencing any issues please let us know asap.

Regards,

What can you do?

Pre-emptive sledges for winter weather

More coverage for Sledges.co.uk on the BBC. The winter sales have been in line with the extent of the snowfall across the UK and record sales for November and December 2009, and January 2010 so far, have almost overwhelmed the outdoor shop's staff.

One challenge is actually getting the sledges delivered to the customers as many roads across the UK are not reliable under current weather conditions. Courier and delivery companies are now looking at using motorised sledges to deliver goods in snowbound territories...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...