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...