We've just delivered the re-branded Brighton Colour Me Beautiful website in time for Christmas.
Grpahic design for the site was done by Blank Associates and it was re-skinned and re-developed in WordPress by cFront.
The new site offers online analysis, gift vouchers with payments handled by Paypal.
cFront Software have just developed a new website for Absolute Vacuum Services Ltd.
Absolute Vacuum are one of the United Kingdom's leading independent high vacuum suppliers, with over 25 years of experience in all aspects of high vacuum.
As well as offering full vacuum pump servicing, repairs and installation they supply vacuum parts and products from a wide range of suppliers incluing Edwards, Leybold, Pfeiffer, Kinney, Ilmvac, MANN+HUMMEL and many more.
With such a huge range of products and services Absolute Vacuum needed a database driven website to organise and serve the product data more efficiently. They also needed a way to keep the product data updated from supplier catalogues on a regular basis.
cFront developed the new website based on the Umbraco CMS with bespoke usercontrols to provide the product import and management tools.
We kept the existing WordPress blog to avoid losing years of blog posts. It was simply re-skinned to fit in seamlessly with the new website.
Users can easily find products using a variety of search terms including part number, description, manufacturer etc...
cFront Software have been working with Brighton-based graphic designers Blank Associates to deliver a completely revamped website for Havana Spoon.
Blank Associates provided us with the design, graphics and functionality requirements for the Havana Spoon website.
We developed the site on the Umbraco CMS, creating the various page templates and custom .NET usercontrols as required. The slideshows, music control and pretty looking page scrollers were all built using jQuery.
The slideshows provide users with a glimpse of Havana Spoon's stunning interioir and allows then to explore the menus and get in touch to make a reservation at this popular venue.
www.havanaspoon.com
We recently had to develop a small demo using custom imagery in Google Maps - using the Google Maps interface to navigate around a map we provided.
This map could potentially not directly relate to the world - for example, the classic London Tube Map would be useful if zoom and scrollable, but it bears no relation to where the lines actually go in real life!
There are lots of resources aimed at version 2 of the Google API, but not so much aimed at v3. However, there's enough out there to put it all together.
The main hurdle with creating your own custom maps is generating all of the imagery at different zoom levels - each zoom level splits the image into "tiles" which Google then loads as it needs.
There are various tools out there for cutting tiles, of which MapTiler seemed the most promising. However, it generates the tiles in a directory structure for version 2, which complicates the map display a bit, and more importantly it was squashing the image.
As we had very simple requirements - we didn't need any geographical location handling or anything to change the map projection - we decided to write our own tile cutter, which we are providing as a free download to help anyone else struggling with similar needs!
You can download the application from here. We will also soon release the source code, once it has been packaged into an easy to compile form.
Here's a demo showing an interactive map of Bas Lag, the world in the very amazing China Miéville Perdido Street Station series (view in a new window):
Image credit: JenJenRobot, http://jenjenrobot.deviantart.com
Application screenshot:
We have decided to make user links from comments made on the cFront blog dofollow i.e. we've taken out the nofollow tag.
This means that if you comment on our blog posts you can add a link to your website which will be indexed by search engines.
It's our way of giving something back.
To find out more check this out:
http://dofollow.info/blog/dofollow-link-building/
One of our clients recently reported an issue with the Facebook like functionality on their blog. When an article was "Liked" it would post to the user's Facebook profile ok, but the thumbnail image it showed was one of the sponsor logos on the site rather than their main website logo.
After a bit of searching around we found that it's possible to tell Facebook which image to use by adding the appropriate Open Graph (og) Tag to the meta tags in the <head> section of the page.
In this case we added the tag:
<meta property="og:image" content="full image URL e.g. http://www.example.com/images/logo.png" />
For more information visit the Facebook Developers section:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
To get feedback from Facebook about your page markup use the Facebook URL Linter:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/
cFront Software have released a new version of their website project requirements worksheet.
The worksheet enables people to define their requirements for a new website in a simple structured format. It encourages to them to think about what they want to achieve, who their users are and how they will measure success.
If you need a new website then please feel free to download and use the worksheet.
Once complete please send it back to us and we will be in touch.
Here is the QR Code for the cFront Software website, which will be appearing on our new business cards and other printed literature soon.
Scan the QR Code with your phone for quick and easy access to the cFront Software website.
If you haven't got the necessary app, you could try installing Neoreader
cFront Software have just launched a new WordPress website for Jean West Hairdressing.
www.jeanwesthair.co.uk
Jean West is a Sussex-based freelance hairdresser working in both a professional Hairdressing Salon (Giovanni's, Brighton) and as a mobile hairdresser, visiting clients in their home.
Jean approached us with some ideas and we put created a design for her logo and website, which she loves:
The website is based on Wordpress CMS, which enables Jean to manage the content herself. Clients can also book online using ClickBook.
cFront Software have just launched the revamped Tigerlily Training website. The website has been re-structured, so it is easier to navigate. We have also added more colour and redesigned the home page to include more features, such as upcoming first aid courses, a location map, testimonials and links to key sections of the site.
Behind the scenes we have simplified the markup, linked the courses to a database with an admin system, linked the online booking system with RBS Worldpay and added jQuery to improve the UI, in particular with the location map links.
Tigerlily Training is part of the Tigerlily Recruitment Group and provides first aid training for people working with children and adults.
