The site will provide a searchable database using names, craft type and areas of the UK. While yet to be officially launched full listings and ads will be free.  You can register using the form in the site to get a listing.

News about crafts and design are also planned. We’re also looking for craft articles. These will be published on the site and allow links and full author accreditation, so please get those coming in.

If you have a craft based website and you want to improve it’s visibility and your search engine ranking then get your application in now.

There were many pictures that Panthers wanted to use and these have been displayed using a “hoverbox” effect and also incorporated some FlickR slideshows into the training pages. The new website has been launched and is going through some final tweaks, and the club are very pleased with our efforts to provide what they wanted. Panthers are now working on getting themselves some good rankings for searches.

The new look design is very clean and simple, not too many colours and has very simple navigation. All the content is still there, in one form or another, though has been rearranged logically (I hope) to keep it as simple as possible.

The old logo and background has gone as well, and a new logo has been produced. I’ve used a ‘folks’ text which was in the header of the old site and so keeps some semblance of continuity and I’m pleased with it. It’s sad to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge go, but you never know, I may bring it back at some time.

Meanwhile I’m leaving comments open on this post, so if anyone would care to pass judgment on the new design I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Our new dedicated website www.webdesignfirst.co.uk will offer the service with an introductory offer of a site + .co.uk domain name + a years hosting.

This new service will provide a “cheaper” way of getting on the web for the smaller business while still maintaining our principles of good design with accessibility.

Though the layout of the site is pretty familiar the client is very happy with the finished result and it was a low cost venture for all concerned.

I tried a few providers using a “soft phone” and headset both paid and unpaid through my desktop but really didn’t think it was that good and was on the verge of giving up. However over the last month or so I noticed on a business forum a lot of discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of voip itself and then some further discussion on hardware. This led me to look again at the possibilities and providers.

It seems that not all providers are the same, now there’s a surprise. Call charges vary, to non-geographical numbers in particular, as does the cost of acquiring and using a geographical number. I didn’t want to go for an 0845 or an 0800 number, instead I wanted a 0117 number for Bristol where I’m actually based. The various providers also offer a variety of different services, some useful, some not so useful and some very necessary.

From my tinkering days I’d already got an 0117 number but not used it much, so decided to use this to see if things had improved. Number portability is an option with some providers, so no problem there, except that there maybe a charge. Fortunately I have a number with a fairly decent provider so I began to try again.

The breakthrough, if I can call it that, was when I decided to spend some of my hard earned on a proper phone and bin the headset. Using the combination of “softphone” and usb headset or handset was not working, and I felt assured by the forums that the quality of the line should be as good or better than a normal land line. So lashing out on a Grandstream GXP 2000 I’m pleased to say I’m delighted and so far it is all working very well indeed. Calls are clear and sharp and the ‘phone does what I want it to do. Combined with the facilities offered by my provider I actually feel in control of the whole setup.

Glad I went back to it.

Under instruction from the client Steve Pillinger Roofing, we have created a website along traditional design concepts. The site is informational and aimed at domestic and commercial customers in the Bristol, Bath and South West. The site contains some interesting images of their work and recent roofing projects in the South West. To display the images we used the “hoverbox” method displaying a thumbnail, larger image on hover and largest image on click. There are also 2 flash movies in the site. One shows, on the home page, a run through of recently completed work, while the other shows step by step the roofing contractor at work. There will be some fine tuning over the next couple of weeks while the owner gets used to their new site.

Cutting a long story short iMaker has taken the leap and will shortly be offering web hosting. This will be offered as an additional service to web design and should complement the services we currently offer. It has taken several months of research to find the right UK servers and the right level of service that we believe will pay off for our customers new and old.

We are currently working on a new website for the hosting, wip is here – website hosting.

Elsewhere the big G still seems to be struggling, more updates have been filtering through. There were rumours that it was broken or that it had lost data, there’s no confirmation of that but the serps do seem to bear out that there could be some fact in those rumours. There is so much garbage in the search listings it’s worrying. G is currently in the middle of a page rank update, or “export” as their employees like to call it.

The new iphone finally got an outing and we all here think it’s just the most wanted in our wish list. Shame to have to wait a while before we can get one.

Vista has arrived, but strangely there isn’t quite such a clamour in the ranks to get hold of a copy as there is for the iphone. Past MS releases have forced the writer to take a long view and to wait until someone else has found all the bugs. When the SE or SP2 version comes out with those initial bugs fixed, then I may “dip my toe into the water” and give it a go, but not before.
Managed too eradicate the spam coming through this blog, now if only I could do the same for my email inbox.

Content management research has shown that my personal favourite is CMS made simple. I’m still testing and developing but have found it does what I want it to. The odd thing though is that I would still like it to generate xhtml pages as an alternative to php for static sites but that’s probably just me.

Finally IE7, I’ve been using it for a while now and have found, much to my surprise, that I actually quite like it.