Freelance Website and Media design

After a development cycle lasting over a year, we’re stoked to finally release the new version of the JBA Seed Potatoes retail store.

The new site is a complete teardown and rebuild of the old site, which was built on a system dating back to 2007 and was the very model of feature creep. We wrote an entirely new back-end system from the ground up, which controls content to this site and JBA’s wholesale sister site.

We’ve focused strongly on ease of use on the new site: there’s a lot of new functionality to make the buying process as simple as possible, but two of my favourites have to be the instant product filters (with permalinks) and the ‘Notify me when this product is in stock’ function.

This project was marred by the unexpected passing of our programmer, Yabba, which I’ve blogged about elsewhere. A tragic loss, and much missed.

Lead Rope is an equine assisted training company based in Southern Scotland: we launched their new site this month. Working to a very specific brief, we went for a clean, modern feel to promote their corporate and executive training, building a custom theme for Wordpress based on their logo colour scheme.

A mix of business and pleasure here, putting together a site to catalogue a private collection of vintage tractors. We used a combination of vintage photos, scanned pictures from the last two decades, and a quick on-site shoot to put together an eye-catching design which reflected the heritage of the collection.

For those of you keeping your browsers up-to-date, there’s some nice CSS3 effects here, including box shadow/bevel effects and item transformation. It’s lovely doing this in CSS rather than pre-production in Photoshop: not only can you make multiple changes through the stylesheet, you also get graceful degradation for restricted users.

A nice new brand and website for this local hotel. We carried out a couple of photoshoots earlier in the year and added some custom content in a custom-developed Wordpress theme, with a little custom-built Javascript work to add the final touches.

What started as a simple Wordpress upgrade turned into something a bit more involved - the Gretna Green Weddings website launched this month, with a whole bunch of goodies attached.

We remapped the site content into a hierarchical system to make navigation easier, and integrated inline enquiry form systems - which submit without reloading the page - into key points of the site, before laying out data in an easy-to-read grid format. This was all underpinned by the booking calculator: a single-page, three-step process to allow clients to place booking enquiries quickly and easily.

Catherinefield Windows came to us at the end of last year with a request to update their website to bring in more traffic and showcase their product range. We worked on a new design and information layout which focused on directing traffic towards requesting a quote for their product range, which launched this month.

The new site is built around Wordpress, with a whole lot of template tweaking to let the client display products in a catalogue layout - surprisingly simple, thanks to the WP-native page ancestor variables - and worked with an SEO expert to put together content.

We integrated a bit of jQuery functionality into the site too, to allow us us to validate and invisibly submit forms for each product and display key content on the front page, which has had good feedback so far.

Technologies: WordPress, php, css, jQuery

A quick wordpressification and lick of paint for this rural kennels and cattery. We took an existing site and updated the design and content a bit to produce something which should work well with search engines, as well as showcasing the spectacular location too. It’s also got a rather neat jQuery’d form system which invisibly submits via an Ajax call - and a lot of very nice photos provided by the client.

I’ve been helping Eastlands update and maintain their website for the last year or so, and we’ve just set their new design live. A straight back-to-basics job here, with the emphasis on content and a clean, simple design.

We’ll be moving the site across to a new server soon, and replacing page IDs with search engine friendly URLs for a bit of extra search engine efficiency; this coupled with clean code and regular content updates should maintain the sites ratings.

I’ve been working with Kirkwood Real Farm Holidays lately to update their branding, logos and website design. The results are now online: a custom Wordpress site with multiple templates, full-screen fixed backgrounds, and the usual jQuery loveliness to round it off. The site also connects to an online booking system provided by our friends at SuperControl.

Technologies: xhtml, css, WordPress, SuperControl

The White Hart in Dumfries is a bit of a local institution: it’s been running for 170 years and has survived all that the town can throw at it (including an impressive amount of flooding last year): so, it was nice to get the chance to update its rather dated website.

Following a photography session earlier in the year, we used Wordpress and a light smattering of jQuery scripting to reorganise the content into five colour-coded sections, and built a brand new design which focused on the Hart’s lively atmosphere and live events rather than the generic hotel template which had previously been followed.

Technologies: Wordpress, jQuery, xhtml/css, htaccess page rewrites.