It is always great to be involved with any large event, especially when the motivaition is charitable.
The Paddle Round the Pier beach festival in Brighton has been going since 1996, during which time it has raised over £100,000 for charities. The event was conceived by David Samuel of DSA and was originally surfers just paddling around Brighton’s Pier to raise funds for charity.

Since then the event has grown in size and popularity to become an internationally reknowned event which is rated by the press and visited by 40,000 people a year – and it is free.

Last year we were involved with the coordination of the Paddle Something Unusual where a series of unlikely floats took to the seas. This year we set out to improve the website. Last year’s website was a slick and comprehensive affair but it was not readily editable by the many volunteers who comprise the paddle team.

The Paddle is a social event and so required the facility to bring together all the online threads and make it the focal point of a community.

We built the site using a page structure which echoes the various areas of action such as water events, land events, kids, entertainment and music. The music area of the site was given a custom menu as it is almost an event in its own right. Wordpress’ post functionality allows us to add press releases and news in a separate format and with RSS feed generated for simple syndication. Additionaly the website’s URL structure was improved upon with clean addresses and a simple navigational structure. We were also able to repoint old web addresses to the new ones via 301 permanent redirection so that bookmarked pages and backlinks could still find the requested content. The site is a rich source of accessible information and is fully SEO optimised.

Social media plugins were implemented on each page to read from the feeds generated by the event’s various outlets such as Twitter, YouTube , Facebook and Flickr. We were also able to echo the structure of the Flickr galleries onto the gallery page on the website.

The site’s IA (Information Architecture) was agreed upon through meetings with the Volunteer team , A1Surf and DSA ;whilst Mayermedia and Bionic Graphics provided both branding and graphical direction.

The result has been an engaging and feature rich website which allows a disparate team to add content as the festival grows, which looks great.

Further Information is, of course, available at www.paddleroundthepier.com
The event takes place on Hove Lawns, Brighton, East Sussex on the weekend of July 2^nd and 3^rd this year – 2011

If you are a charity event which wants help in any way with your online ventures then please contact us, if we have free time we will be happy to help.

Aloha

Brighton based Parsley Productions came to us looking for a simple, yet elegant solution to showcase the company’s long heritage in storyboarding, filming, producing and editing high quality TV for broadcast.

Wishing to have the site simple to edit for Parsley we decided upon Joomla – an open source content management system. This allows the website owner to have full control over the content and structure of the site.
Although this was the first time we have used Joomla, we found it simple and clean to install. Designs were also easily incorporated into the structure. Though initially we found the hierarchy of content in the Joomla back office a little daunting, it was not long before we had it pinned down.

The site was developed and built on a development server supplied by Rightclick and then moved to its final point, tested and launched.

We were unlucky launching the site just as the ‘hactivism’ reached its peak as the site’s new server was affected by the Wikileaks/ DOS attacks and we found the site sluggish initially.

Thankfully this soon cleared up and the site was live and kicking.

Apart from the obvious bonus of having the site content managed Parsley are able to use 3rd party content on the site also.
They have their Twitter feed on the home page and make use of YouTube to allow their video work to be streamed onto the website.

A SEF ( search engine friendly URL Structure ) was applied to the site, via Joomla back office, and it was integrated with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to give Parsley the best chance of analysing the site’s performance ( in terms of traffic, SEO, profile and content).

Parsley Productions

Telephones Online specialises in selling cordless phones from a variety of manufacturers, including BT, Panasonic, Philips, John Lewis, Siemens Gigaset , Magic Box. These phones can be ordered through a variety of channels such as eBay, Amazon and Telephones Online’s own eCommerce shop.

The original website was launched in the final decade of the last century.
Their site was in its second functional incarnation. It having been based upon two different eCommerce technologies over the course of time.

As eCommerce evolved and so did their routes to market. Telephones Online had to look for another solution to accurately control all their merchandising avenues. An increasing percentage of their sales were coming from alternative routes as more and more online shopping activity centred on stores like eBay and Amazon.

So, after careful consideration it was decided that eSeller pro could provide the basis for this venture. This system allows a full inventory control for the merchant selling online, you can choose which products are sold through which channels ( i.e., tick the eBay box, tick the Amazon box, select which website etc )

The biggest benefit of using eSellerPro is that product can be sold across multiple channels from a single inventory. Their channel profile feature automatically manages the stock levels across channels according to user specified rules (e.g. percentage of available stock or a fixed quantity). Once channel profiles have been created there is never any need to manage stock levels on different channels.

quote from tamebay

eSeller Pro has delivered a superb backoffice which is allowing the merchants to manage all their routes to market and inventories under one, easily accessible login.

The new site has been optimised sensibly with relation to the major search engines with a series of 301 redirects from cached pages from the previous site and new Pay per Click campaign initiated with Google and other search partners.

Telephones Online site makes for a clear and easy process for the customer to find, and buy cordless phones online.

Site is at : Telephones Online

We are please to have just launched the website for Tiger Lily Childcare who wanted a site to cover their expanding business in First Aid Training Courses for those involved in childcare.

The brief was to design a site in keeping with their current branding but to have an identity of its own.

The site incorporates a hand coded folder structure for a clean SEO perspective, making the site both accessible and usable. Main elements were brought out using sIFR, a technology which allows Flash replacement of text. (CSS3 will eventually make this unnecessary).

Site may be seen at : Paediatric Training Courses

Currently the site runs its online booking of first aid training courses through paypal, but in the near future we expect to roll out further sophistication site wide, making the site easier to use for everyone concerned – as that is our goal.