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.

Under the radar stuff

January has been a time of investing in new equipment and software as well as working on some yet-to-be-made-public projects so nothing much to post to the world. Pleased to get VMware up and running at last and upgrading workstations to dual monitor setups - amazing to have gone so long without this!

Some new ecommerce developments in the post as well as some interesting logo design and wordpress experiments.

Six-figure sledges

As the year closes and the snow melts across the UK leaving the winter detritus, Callisti can reflect on an interesting 2010 and look forward to 2011. One milestone was the sledges online shop breaking the six-figure record turnover for the December, a far cry from when Callisti first took over management of the website - a lot of snow certainly helps. New possibilities have emerged as a result of the improved online presence heralding some business developments in the years to come.

JBA seed potatoes has grown significantly and is scaling up in terms of hosting and development requirements - Callisti has acted as a nursery for the ecommerce site, bringing it from a catalog website to the number one seed potato ecommerce site in the UK,  but with the new ranges of domestic and merchant services, a new strategy for hosting and development is required - Callisti will likely offer specialist support in 2011 with other support services being provided to ensure the most stable solution.

One difficulty for small operators is the balance between specialisation and broad adaptability for the range of potential clients. Do you concentrate on hosting services and volumes? Or specialise in one particular development platform? 2011 will be a year for new decisions...

A toe in the waters of Drupal

The Braidwoods website provides a selection of property in Dumfries and Galloway and Callisti is pleased to be able to help with their website hosting requirements. This is one of a growing number of Drupal content-managed websites on the books.

The website is updated by Braidwoods staff with properties for sale for which they act as estate agents. The property details display the schedule as a web page but also include a print-friendly option.

Welcome to the world of cron jobs...

The Albany Group

The Albany UK website has a soft launch period at the moment so we'll be monitoring how the site stands up with some top-heavy scripts. There are some known issues with Internet Explorer 8 and the Featured Content Gallery so this may be reviewed depending on feedback.

The website is a bespoke design update to the previous site and includes Ipix and Flash virtual tours, press-releases, past and present property projects, modal contact form, textured navigation, search engine friendly urls, interactive slideshow and image carousel, and information about the team.

Based on a wordpress CMS with lots of template editing and updates to functions.php

This represents more Callisti endeavours for The Creative 6 in London

Thanks to this useful mime types work.