Diary for May 2009
11th Shellfish Safaris
The new website for Shellfish Safaris has been launched today. It promotes the boat trips offered by Ian McWhinney around Gairloch on the West Coast of Scotland where passengers can experience creel fishing a first hand and see the wide range of shellfish that Ian catches every day. Some of Ian's langoustines end up on the tables of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, and some of the his catch is sold directly to those who join him on one of the Shellfish Safaris. Ian's shellfish is also available at ...
8th Relaunch of Dry Island Website
The new website for Dry Island was launched today. The site has undergone a major re-design and complete content overhaul. The re-branding makes the most of all the beautiful photographs of the island and accommodation. We also put the Island on Google maps and linked up the existing information and reviews that were already there from TripAdvisor. The site can be visited at www.dryisland.co.uk...
1st Grand Opening of Lynch Lane Offices
Lynch Lane Offices in Weymouth are having their Grand Opening between 4.30pm and 6.30pm. If you would like an invitation then please call Charlotte on 01305 831777 or email her charlotte@lynchlaneoffices.com MP Jim Knight will perform the official opening. We've provide design and support services for www.lynchlaneoffices.com...
30th Listening and Learning
At various points of our development as a company we have been lucky enough to talk with people who have helped us move forward and take on the next challenge that has presented itself. We've also had situations where conversations with people have revealed more about what we do than we'd given ourselves credit for. Over recent months this has been very true of our conversations with Regine Jong. Working in marketing as her day job, she has given us the benefit of her insights and understanding...
29th Road Angel Fleet Tracking for CNL24
Our partners at CNL24 are now offering a fantastic set of fleet tracking services from Road Angel. Fleet Monitor, Fleet Locator and Live Track are all available directly through CNL24. To mark this new development in their business we have added a new section to their website which mirrors the Fleet Angel website content, but is branded within the CNL24 corporate style. The results look really smart, and both Fleet Angel and CNL24 are really happy with the results. www.cnl24.com/road-angel...
27th New CMS In Full Flow
John Bullock Lighting Design, the second installation of our new CMS [content management system], is now beginning to prove the power of the system we have developed. Over the past few weeks since the new site has been launched, John has been putting his "back catalogue" of images and writing onto the site. And this week he has started to add new content to the site from scratch. His latest musings on the state of the Lighting Design Industry are to be found on one of his 3 blogs. www.jb-ld.co....
26th A Tender Moment
Last week we put in a tender for a website for a local charity that is based in the West Dorset area. This is the first time in a little while that we've thrown our hat into the ring for a public / charity sector website. My usual reluctance to get involved with any tendering process was overcome by the impressive work that the charity does, and a personal wish to get involved and support their activities. In the past we've spent considerable amounts of time working up tender documents for a ...
22nd A Breezy Start to the Summer
The breezy weather of the past week has been echoed in the flurry of new work that we've received. Since the beginning of May we've been commissioned to work on another six new website projects. Some of them are re-brands, some of them we are taking on the maintenance of the clients' existing sites, and some are to build new websites from scratch. For me this brings another wave of creativity and interest that are so vital in keeping my love for this type of work alive. The challenge of each ...
19th Glowing Praise from Dry Island
Today we received a lovely email from Jess Dodd at Dry Island, whose website we have recently updated. I'll let Jess take up the story ... "Ian has been doing self catering on Dry Island for 17 yrs. He started this to supplement his income due to the declining fishing industry in the area. Needing a website to move with the times, his partner, Jess contacted Jon Sloper after seeing an advert on the web about 5 years ago. "A very lucky find indeed. The original website was fantastic. Using ...
18th Dry Island - Re-brand Success Story
Just a quick note to mark the fact that within 3 weeks of the relaunch of Dry Island's website they are now "full to end of August" (Jess Dodd)! This is not only a milestone for Jess and Ian who were looking for an improvement in their bookings but is a great endorsement of our hard work and creative approach to re-marketing their Self Catering holidays on the beautiful West Coast of Scotland. Take a look at the site and you can see why they're now so busy! www.dryisland.co.uk...
15th Robin Mills - Photographs of Dorset
This afternoon we have launched an updated version of Robin Mills's fantastic photography website. It profiles him as a photographer and farmer, living and working in the Dorset countryside, and features his extraordinary black and white photographs. We created Robin's original website almost 4 years ago now, when screens were smaller and most people were still on dial-up internet connections (remember them?). The brief for this first site, was "small but perfectly formed" with a set of sensi...
14th Recent Reading - Thinking About Meatballs
I usually have about 4 books on the go at any point in time, usually a mixture of technical and business books and novels. Over the past couple of months, several of them have been not only very interesting but also memorable, both for what they said, and the quality of the writing. Meatball Sundae - Seth Godin (2009) This is the second of Seth Godin's books that I've read, having been impressed by "Purple Cow" a number of years ago. It covers the challenge...
13th Promising Start for Re-launched Site
A week after the re-launch of the Dry Island website and the initial effects of the redesign are beginning to show; both in terms of increased traffic and aesthetic appreciation. Normally I wouldn't expect the results to be noticeable quite so quickly after a site is launched, but because the Dry Island website has been on the internet for many years, it already has listings on all the major search engines and is regularly "spidered" or re-indexed by them all. This means that the changes ha...
8th Brilliant New Seashore Book from River Cottage
The new seashore book from river cottage is now out and frankly it's brilliant. It's written by John Wright - the mushroom man from River Cottage - and has the same witty style as his very popular mushroom handbook. The book covers all sorts of interesting edible plants and animals that you can uncover with a bit of time spent playing along the seashore. We had the pleasure of visiting Ringstead Bay with John a couple of weeks ago and he introduced us to about a half dozen edible seaweeds withi...
7th Dry Island Relaunch
Following on from yesterday's notice about the revisions to the two websites New Shoots and New Directions we are pleased to announce the relaunch of the first of the two websites --- www.dryisland.co.uk We've brought the design that we originally created about 7 years ago right up to date by subtle use of colour, text and photography. It features images taken by Jess and Ian at Dry Island, supplemented with images from iStockPhoto's photo library. This mixture gives a high quality ...
6th New Shoots and New Directions
As the search engines continually refine and adjust their formulae for working out which sites deserve to get which position in their listings, so we're also continually improving and responding with the code we're writing into our clients' websites. While this seems a bit like a circular process, in fact so long as we stay on the ball, the end results are almost always beneficial for our clients. The reason for this is that Google and its kin want to put the most relevant and genuine sites at ...
4th Under the Hammer - Objects of Desire At Auction
In April we worked with Dukes Auctioneers in Dorchester to produce a special slideshow of images from two of their forthcoming sales. These have been so popular that we're now preparing to create a third for their Jewellery auction in June. The aim of the slideshows is to create a simple presentation of key auction lots to show to the public. These have included paintings and drawings by David Hockney, Henri Matisse and Lucien Freud. The superb professional photography adds a sense of class a...
Alacrify Ltd. 01300 320076. jon@alacrify.co.uk
