Hammock the week

After convoluted development process using Actinic v9, Handmade Hammocks website is now refreshed and taking advantage of some Kit Allen design work and integration with google services.

The ecommerce website sells handmade hammocks that meet Fairtrade standards to meet the prinicples of ethical trading. The company is based near Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and ships internationally

Callisti has gained a lot of experience working with the nuances of Actinic development from different locations, development by remote access, and all the joys of site exports, missing files, huge folders of backup files, cgi-bin dramas, incompatible server platforms, and payment gateway issues. The reward is a sweet-looking ecommerce site that now has more SEO potential for the new season, and a clean working environment after some thorough administration work.

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.

Shared hosting

Using a reseller account to provide web hosting has the advantage of a control panel, the use of which can be learned. This may seem trite but it is important to have some kind of stable and consistent platform that is easily documentable, allows for more experienced clients to update their own hosting preferences within defined parameters, provides broad monitoring data on bandwidth usage and disk storage, and is scalable at lower risk to client website uptime.

Something to do with horses and courses.

It is clear that the needs of clients aren't always best served by dedicated hosting solutions when budget is a factor in providing expedient service.

Electric boogaloo

...Newspeep...

This October, Callisti welcomes Dumfries and Galloway musical performers Boogaloo to the new hosting service on offer. A customised 'website baker' website inherited from the old Digitl legacy with scope for some fine-tuning and modernisation.

...End Newspeep...

Property maintenance in Dumfries

The Ewart Property Maintenance website was created using a customised wordpress template from thebookofblog.com to provide a simple, navigable website describing property services in Dumfries and Galloway, extending to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Carlisle and Newcastle.

This was not heavily marketed but concentrated on onsite SEO and xml sitemaps to give the content some foundation that could be developed when required. Happily the client is reporting that business is being generated by the site's presence so it is wiping it's own bum or washing it's own face, depending on your idiomatic preference.

Youtube takeovers

Having fun with appearance and reality. These are entertaining advertisements stemming from the WariolandShakeIt youtube takeover in 2008...

Tippex - this must have been fun filming for the various probable range of outcomes users would have suggested - the 404 error raises a smile. Good use of takeover techniques.

Expendables - the comments text has degraded a bit in the image used but the promotional interview for the 2010 movie is still worth a chuckle.

Old Spice (especially amusing are the youtube replies to various tweets and diggs, etc) - more of a character build up using the actor Isaiah Mustafa, a former wide-receiver in the NFL.

Pay as you go e-marketing

A strong 5 out of 5 from Callisti to Contact Multimedia's E-marketing services, yet again. An agricultural client has recently launched a successful subscriber-based campaign to update customers on seasonal offers and pre-ordering for 2011 to a great response.

Contact Multimedia's account based system lets you set up campaigns with great ease, using a pre-designed existing html webpage and an easy to use interface so you know where you are in the process at any given time. You can send test emails to make sure everything appears correctly before committing to scheduling the mailshot. Great stuff.