Web design and development in London and Surrey

301 Redirects for Migrating Site

ZorinWeb — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:48:11 +0000

Teamed up with a London based marketing agency to assist them in migrating a static site to a WordPress powered contemporary effort. The static site had scores of pages, in both classic ASP and PHP, and were each given a 301 redirect.

The code ’301′ is interpreted by search engines as ‘moved permanently’. This is a straightforward and search engine friendly method for redirecting web pages, which should preserve rankings. Using PHP, to permanaently move a page to ‘newpage.html’, insert the following piece of code at the very top of your document, being careful not to include any white space above and below by the DOCTYPE declaration:
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location: http://www.somesite.co.uk/newpage.html" ); ?>

Design to HTML for www.theartofservice.co.uk

ZorinWeb — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:51:43 +0000

Marked up the wonderful web designs designs in HTML for The Art of Service, a website set up to market a hospitality board game by Michel Roux Jnr’s co-host on the BBC2 series about service and hospitality, ‘Michel Roux’s Service’. From the site, ‘The Art of Service board game is a training tool for restaurant and hotel owners, F&B directors and hospitality lecturers’.

It’s an engaging concept, now live on the web. To see more, go to www.theartofservice.co.uk.

Magento Based Ecommerce Site Goes Live

ZorinWeb — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:27:28 +0000

Slick Willies, a UK leading skate retailer and one of the longest-established skate shops in London, upgraded their website with ZorinWeb. The website is a Magento ecommerce solution, and boasts an attractive and highly usable design.

The site has been up and running for a month now, and is already attracting a great deal of organic traffic, and consequently, generating online sales. With a solid SEO foundation in place, content will assure the site continues to grow.

To see it in action, or buy some skate gear, go to:slickwillies.co.uk.

Redesign and SEO for London Based Art Gallery

ZorinWeb — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:37:24 +0000

London based art gallery, and Damien Hirst specialist, Roman Black Gallery, treated itself to an overhaul, both in terms of design and content structure. Given the bespoke nature of the galleries and the fact that the site would be handling a lot of images, Drupal was choosed as a CMS, in favour of WordPress.

In short, CCK module was invoked to assemble a number of custom forms, the results of which sorted in Views, and final brought to the user’s screen via Panels.

The SEO mix featured Nodewords, XML Sitemap, Page Title, and Google Analytics. As expected, ImageCache was used heavily to handle images.

New Site for Surrey Contact Sports Specialist

ZorinWeb — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:09:14 +0000

Whipped up version two of a site for the guys at Nova Forca. Along with a new design, the site moves up to the much improved WordPress 3.

Drupal YouTube Clone

ZorinWeb — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:17:56 +0000

I built a very simplistic YouTube style website dedicated to a popular motoring program. The site’s used to search and serve up videos, all generated from third parties.

Drupal provided an excellent base, along with a host of modules. Specifically, the core modules used are Views, Panels, CCK, ImageCache, JW Player, Voting API, and Five Star.

Yell! Microsite HTML/CSS

ZorinWeb — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:56:04 +0000

Took designs for a Yell! campaign microsite and converted them to a functioning site. This was a pretty standard psd/design to (X)HTML job.

The site is a bid from Yell! to match up local businesses with local customers. Have a look over at yelltour.co.uk.

WordPress Coding for LegionLive.org

ZorinWeb — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:16:42 +0000

I implemented a new front end design for LegionLive, The Royal British Legion’s online community. The site has a very engaging look and feel, and leverages a good number of web 2.0/social community mediums, providing a hub of activity for Royal British Legion members and friends alike.

I provided an interface for CMS functions, customised a slideshow for the home page, all the while making sure it was fully integrated with WordPress Mu.

PSD to WordPress of London based Social Media Blogger

ZorinWeb — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:07:40 +0000

I recently took a very user orientated design, laden with the kind of best practices espoused in Steve Krug’s, “Don’t Make Me Think”, from Photoshop to WordPress. The site’s called Social galaxies, and is run by Ed Thompson, a social media and social games analyst. Interesting commentary and analysis is served up on social games, with a particular emphasis toward the Facebook platform.

As an aside, content from Ed’s old Blogger account was transported via the handy WordPress ‘import’ function. Although imported in an untidy spaghetti like inline code fashion, it certainly relived the burden of having to paste each and every blog post. All in all, it’s a great function for a prolific Blogger based blogger looking to upgrade to a self hosted WordPress outfit.

For the actual programming of the blog, customised template pages were utilised for the ‘about’ , ‘newest’, and ‘archive’ pages. The ‘about’ page saw the use of custom fields to extend WordPress’s CMS capabilities to allow Ed to post both images and descriptions of his favourite books. The ‘newest’ page leveraged a custom page template so as to order and limit the latest posts by date, while similarly, the ‘archive’ displays category headings and related posts by date.

In addition to customised Facebook and Twitter plugins, a user subscription and Google sitemap plugin rounded out the build.

PSD to WordPress of Sharply Designed Craftsman Website

ZorinWeb — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:50:22 +0000

Coded up a talented designer’s clean tradesman layout. The design focuses on usability and straight to point content. Images play a large role as they’re an immediate endorsement of the craftsman’s ability and skill.

In order for the website owner to manage his own content, WordPress was used as a CMS (content management system). Each page is editable, while images can be uploaded to a specific category, which will then appear on the website automatically re-sized. The quotations and contact pages feature forms that check for incorrect email addresses and make sure compulsory fields are satified. Here’s a screenshot of the site:

To see it in action, go to here.