Inaugural blues festival in Thornhill

The end of April heralds the first Blues Festival in Thornhill, Dumfries and Galloway. Organised by local enthusiasts from its inception last year, the blues band itinerary is now online and you can get tickets using paypal.

If you live in the Thornhill area there are a few outlets selling tickets for the main event in Thornhill Community Centre on the night of Saturday 30th April.

The initial website was a simple wordpress install, slightly customised, to get the Thornhill Blues online. It uses google documents as the source of the embedded spreadsheets. After the festival Callisti would like to improve the website usability and functionality.

Event Decor Hire - Redecorated

More customised Wordpress theming using child themes here: background static image for the body with CSS3 box shadow and IE8 fallback - CSS3 gradient works in firefox but not safari or ie8 just now but maybe one day...

The revision concentrates on the silver and blue colours of the logo, dispensing with the heavier burgundy so there's an altogether lighter feel to the website. Use was made of the custom menu feature in wordpress 3 to rationalise the content (and make it more user-friendly for the client to update content and images.)

Excalibur Wedding Cars - Mk2

This was fun! A complete revamp of the wedding limousine website using some CSS3 stuff, background image shenanigans, a touch of wordpress plugin-ery and some more experience of using custom themes and menus the way wordpress 3 suggests.

Playing with the custom header images using the set thumbnail function is rewarding but unless you re-define the dimensions of the header image in the wordpress settings, you need to think letterbox or panoramic landscape when selecting images that are going to look right.

Naturally :) there were some editions to functions.php as it still uses the parent theme for this file. The nod to social networking includes facebook like buttons and a recent activity widget.

To ease migration from the previous website, 301 redirects were employed - the xml sitemaps were updated with Yahoo and Google once the SEO-friendly URLs were set.

Online PDF reader

Handy tool for displaying pdf's in readable format on your website. A bit like the animated pageflip idea which is built using images, this service allows pdf documents to be read in a similar fashion.

So, as a working experiment, the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival brochure for 2011 is now readable on the home page.

The script was generated by Calameo, where you can register to use the service.

Wedding Lounge

The Wedding Lounge (Dumfries) is a new wordpress-based website built using child themes, custom menus and CSS3 - more in line with the way a wordpress framework ought to be customised. There is still a concession to the functions.php file as the parent theme version takes precedence over the child theme in this respect but this may change in future.

The Weddding Lounge website is to promote the services of an upcoming wedding photographer and wedding planner. The site is ready for the start of the wedding shows and fairs being held in Dumfries and Galloway in 2011 so provides an online source of information, as well as linking with the existing facebook profile and image galleries.

Arts festival in Dumfries - May 2011

It's that time of year again, the arts and events brochure for May 2011 has been finalised and made available to patrons of the Arts Festival and the general public via the website. The events are being added to the website and the event calendar is being updated - as with all performance related ventures, there are always details and amendments up until the last minute so everyone involved is kept busy.

The itinerary this year features the Community day in Dumfries (Dock Park) where there will be a range of events over the weekend. As usual there are events throughout the region in the more rural areas, and some more traditional art events for the connoisseurs of drama, music, literature and theatre.

The children's events are also strong this year with poetry, puppetry and dance workshops. It's incredible how many agencies are involved in bringing the festival to life - let's hope it exceeds expectations this year.

Dumfries wedding photographer

Callisti is pleased to be hosting and maintaining the Martin McNae Photography website and gallery after a recent transfer. There are gigabytess of image files being manipulated by Drupal and Imagecache as you would expect from a wedding photographer near the wedding capital of the UK, Gretna.

The .com now redirects to the .co.uk website which was a simple courtesy tidy-up, and Google Analytics has been properly installed now so that it is possible to monitor website visitor trends. Some content pages have been updated and set to display under the gallery section.

A further step into Drupal and cron jobs.