My client is developing a business to supply print and media design services to, principally, the Education market. Typically, their clients will be schools, colleges and universities that want to produce high quality promotional material such as magazines and prospectus. The initial requirement was just for a straightforward website, for which the client provided the design work, that delivered a web presence that could be modified via a content management system.

Our Solution

We have delivered the content management system via the WordPress framework. Whilst the development was straightforward, due to most of the design work and content being provided by the client, there were several difficulties.

Firstly, the company with whom my client had registered the domain name made it very difficult for him to point the domain at a different name server. The original intention was for the website to be hosted on a DMJ server, and the site was developed with this in mind.

Secondly, as we had developed the site in WordPress to provide a good CMS for the client, there was a requirement to add MySql (as WordPress needs MySql to function) to the services provided by the domain hosting company. This would have had an additional cost impact on my client and so we needed to find a way around the problem.

Whilst the client has several pages on the website which are still under construction but which will not be ready for some time, he does not envisage many short-term changes to the site.

Our solution was to continue running a ‘development-mode’ version of the site on our server, allowing WordPress to function normally and for changes to be made to the site in the short term. Static html files for each page of the site were then created from the wordpress-generated html which were then moved to his hosting area. This means that the site can run on the existing limited server without MySql whilst ensuring that when the client moves his site from his current to the DMJ web server all of the components should be in place for the site to continue running sweetly.

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My client has 3 properties in the Manche department of Normandy in France. The brief was to create a single website to effectively advertise each of the properties, whilst providing a good backend content management solution to enable further changes to be made by the client.

Our Solution

We have developed a WordPress website using a premium theme that allows a slider control on the home page to showcase each of the properties.

The site uses the PIMS Holiday Rental Management system for availability calendar and pricing tables, and we have incorporated the booking form option to allow better integration for the owner and potential renters. All of this means that our client can use an external system to manage their holiday bookings whilst ensuring that theavailability calendar is automatically updated on the site.

Integrating the holiday rental management system inside a WordPress site requires some additional coding to allow url parameters to be sent by PIMS and picked up by the website. Contact us for details if you are a holiday property website owner and are having problems.

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

Other clients are pleased with us too…

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This was a personal project of my own, and so close to my heart. A little background… I have owned a property in France for about 20 years and, until recently, had made it available for holiday rentals and had used this domain to essentially market the site. My wife and I now use the house more often and want to keep it for ourselves, so the question was : what to do with the website?

I didn’t want to lose the domain name and wanted to somehow retain, and perhaps improve, the good search engine traffic that the site was getting and so chose to redevelop the site as a general information resource that could be used by English-speakers who lived, worked, owned business or visited Western France. The site would essentially be a multi-contributor blog, and would hopefully attract advertisers with products or services available in the area. I realise that this is perhaps not a sound business justification on its own, but I also felt the site could showcase my own skills, attracting potential new clients looking for cost-effective, yet impressive blogging solutions, or french-related websites – for example, property sales or rentals.

The objective was to have a practical solution in place, including migration of existing website content to the new site, within 2-3 days of development time.

Our Solution

As you can see from the finished site we have built it to function as a sophisticated blog, with a nice slider control to display featured posts and images, and have also incorporated some mapping software so that the location of each post can be shown on a Google Map and associated with the post. This will help those visiting the area to quickly identify things that have been posted about the area they are visiting.

There are a lot of static pages too, which initially hold the content from the previous incarnation of the site, but which will ultimately be expanded to include more regional information.

Overall, we are delighted with the result and have already encouraged several people with an interest in the area to post content on a regular basis. The traffic to the site has increased in the two weeks since launch, and we expect this to keep climbing now with continual and varied contributions from our bloggers and from my efforts at link building and other techniques to get people to visit the site (and stay!).

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

As you might imagine – the client is very pleased and is looking forward to lots more new clients as a result

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

To develop a website allowing registered members to answer questions that other members have added to the site and to add their own questions for others to answer. The idea for the site came from a book by James Surowiecki called “The Wisdom of Crowds”, where the author claims that you can obtain an accurate answer to any quantitative question by asking a large number of people from a variety of backgrounds what they think. The average answer may well be more accurate than the answer one might have obtained from a so-called expert.

The initial development budget was limited, due to the largely experimental nature of the project and no immediately obvious revenue-generating opportunities.

Our Solution

We set out with the aim of using as much readily-available opensource software as possible, in order to keep development costs within the budget agreed with the client, and chose to use :

• WordPress 2.9 to provide an easy to use, self-hosted, content management system
• Woothemes ‘Digital Farm’ theme
• WP-Polls plugin to provide the basis of our polling booth solution
• WP-Include plugin to allow us to integrate our own customised php code

Although using such an array of products gave us a great start, there was a lot of customising to do, mostly around the WP-POLLS plugin, which although it’s a great product and did 80% of what we wanted, it lacked a key bit of functionality. The client wanted questions to be asked that could be answered by members typing in a numeric value, with the average of all answers being displayed. WP-POLLS did not handle this, and only allows questions that can be answered by the memebr choosing from a number of pre-set answers.

Our solution was to modify the opensource code so that members could choose to create either a normal polling question (i.e. What is your favourite colour? Answers : Red, Blue, Green etc.) or a quantitative question (e.g. How many gold medals will Team GB win at the Winter Olympics? – where members can enter their own numeric answer). This presented a number of complications, especially when modifying the javascript code that controls the Ajax transformation when members answer the question.

Overall, we are pleased with the result. There are many opportunities to improve the design and web copy now that the site is launched, and we will be working with the client to address this over the coming months. In addition, we are considering the best ways to market the site to get it in front of a large audience. It is free, but users do need to register in order to add and answer questions.

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.