We were involved from outset, helping with the name, designing a simple logo and corporate literature and brochures as well as the website and email marketing.

Everything has been kept deliberately simple with the aim of showing how important the Montessori Method is in giving children the best possible start. While the website and literature alone would not have been enough, together with Catherine’s tireless work handing out the flyers and canvassing local opinion, the initial campaign has been an incredible success in a few short weeks. And significantly, but not altogether unusually, we haven’t actually met Catherine since she came to us with the project.

Perhaps a little immodestly, this is a good example of a clean and simple site that gets across all that it needs to but is flexible enough to grow as St Edmund’s Pre-School requires.

“Working with Nathan has been an eye-opener!  He is totally dedicated to the job – and offers almost 24hr support in a deadline situation!  Not only has he helped me enormously by creating a very eye-catching and informative website for my new Montessori Pre-School, but he has designed my artwork for several rounds of leaflets, posters and postcards for Marketing purposes.

“As I am a complete novice to the world of Marketing and setting up a business from scratch, he has provided me with incredibly useful insights into the psychology of the stakeholders – whether local residents, potential parents or questioning pcc members.   Most importantly, as I have a very un-mathematical brain, Nathan has even been able to help me unravel the complexities of the grant funding formulas set by the local council and to help me to develop my pricing strategy.

“All in all, Nathan has provided an essential support to me in the setting up of my Montessori Pre-School and  I don’t think anyone else who I went to for a webdesign quote would have provided nearly as much expert advice in so many areas.  I now have 10 children registered with 3 months to go before opening!  I am delighted!”

Catherine Middlemas, St Edmund’s Montessori

*No, rememberable isn’t a proper word.

Just like that clever bird, Jemma -owner of Bowerbird Boutique – has a keen eye for gorgeous stuff that customers can beautify their homes with. And yes, it is mostly ladies. Bowerbird Boutique has an eclectic mix of shabby chic and vintage homewares including divine photo frames and eye catching prints.

But more than just selling products Jemma calls on her years of professional, high-end interior design to impart gems of wisdom in the form of  “Get the look” advice and “Try at home” hints.

The website shows of this range of styles with an equally stand-out look. Mixing a complementry colour palette (pinked by Bowerbird!) with some subtle wallpaper prints, fabulous fonts and bold iconic imagery the Bowerbird site instantly shows that this is not a me too web shop, it has a distinct personality and brand.

The Bowerbird Boutique is definitely worth a look if you are after something out of the ordinary, but very much of the moment.

Visit the site > www.bowerbirdboutique.com

“I feel really happy that the brief for my site  has been wholeheartedly fulfilled, and is more stunning in design than I had imagined it could be. As a client I have felt listened to, respected and cared about from the start, and throughout the process, which gave me confidence, and continues to, in the product. My expectations have been exceeded, which is so refreshing! Thank you.”

Jemma Hillenbrand, Founder Bowerbird Boutique.

The site follows very simple lines and an uncomplicated design because Nina’s photographs are the out and out hero in this website. We want people to be able to sit back and just absorb her work. The objective of the website is to build a profile and generate sales of her limited edition prints.

One essential aspect of the site was that Nina would be able to update the content – including managing the galleries – entirely herself. The WordPress interface is incredibly easy to use and Nina was up and running in no time.

“Nathan was highly recommended to me from a friend and I have to say he far exceeded my high expectations. Incredibly easy to talk to Nathan turned, what had been a very stressful job to me, into a pleasure!

I already had a very specific idea of what I wanted from my website but Nathan was able to offer constructive alternatives and professional advice to problems I hadn’t foreseen. He turned the project round in record breaking time and has provided fast and efficient email and phone support since handing the site over to me.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Nathan to anyone looking for a website designer and will continue to work with him as my company grows and changes in the future.”

Nina Claridge, Photographer and Owner

Visit her site: www.ninaclaridge.com

The website will build on the community and strong following that the fanzine enjoys through a core Forum. Commercially the site will sell exclusive One Team in Bristol merchandise as well as back issues. An advertising engine is also built into the site generating an income that is not tied to Google Adsense or others – the idea is that this will be a chance for fan’s to advertise their own businesses to other supporters.

Work on this project was:

• Bringing OTIB’s website design to a reality
• Design and create the logo
• Full online content management through WordPress
• Online shop with multiple products. Payment through paypal or collect
• Forum
• Advertising and sponsorship management
• T Shirt design (new one on me!!) in the ‘vintage’ SuperDry style

A must for any true Bristol City Fan. www.oneteaminbristol.co.uk

Pinks and Green

What a fantastic project this has been! Not only did this project start from a brief of: can you help us? But the products are as fabulous as the people behind the company.

The original site had come to the end of it’s life. It had done exactly the job it was needed to do – prove that there was a growing market to support the business. Having done that, now the website’s task was to build a brand and sell the gorgeous melamine, kitchen accessories, soft toys, paper mache deers heads and so on.

We started by redesign the look and the feel of the site and made this work with an online content management system. It is fair to say that Pinks and Green are in no way technically minded. Not even vaguely. So the system had to be easy to use and to simple to update.

Above all though it had to be appealing to customers and potential customers. The newly designed website had to ooze family friendly brand appeal and it had to be able to deliver customers from browsing to buying effortlessly. For any modern business (or any traditional business in the modern age) management information is so very important. With Pinks & Green even the most nerdy would have enough data to keep them happy – but on a practical level there are summaries of sales, visitor traffic and more to help inform decisions.

On launching the site Astera created and issued an email newsletter was issued containing news highlights and special sales promotions. At the time of writing this that email had generated a massive 50% click through rate and, within the first few hours, led to a significant sale from a new customer.

At Astera we always enjoy working with the companies that we are lucky enough to call clients. And that is especially true of Pinks and Green. Success couldn’t happen to better people!

So we put together a little program that we are happy to distribute.

Canvas Squarer does exactly that: takes the longest dimension of an image and makes the other one the same. It doesn’t stretch the image instead it positions it in the centre against a white background.

So if you had a 200 x 270 image Canvas Squarer will make the image 270 x 270 and the image would have an extra 35px of padding on the left and right. Just like the cute rabbit example below!

 –>

Canvas Square will convert jpgs, gifs and png file. It will batch process a single folder or all of the subfolders.

NOTE: in creating the new canvas your original image is overwritten. Please back up your folders before processes.

Small print:

Astera created this program for its own purposes. It was tested and used on Windows computers. We release it without cost and importantly without any warranty. Astera accepts no liability whatsoever for any loss arising out of the use of this software. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BACK UP YOUR FILES AS THE PROCESS CAN NOT BE UNDONE BY THIS SOFTWARE!

What we did was start again – although we were working with the current logo which has great brand recall and awareness in and around Somerset. The first most important job was to clarify the company structure so we moved to a new domain: www.notarowindows.com. We are keeping the existing site (snotaroholdings.com) because there are a lot of links to this one. In the near future this S Notaro Holdings website will be redesigned in the same style as the Notaro Windows site and will cover all of the companies activities.

The new site makes it much clearer what the Windows company does. The main areas of Windows, Doors, Conservatories, Porches, Garages and Drives are highly visible from the top bar and also from the side. The team at Notaros take immense pride in their work and as a result they have lots of photos of their installations. We wanted to make the most of this and give each page a big hero image and include a gallery. This can easily be updated with new images.

We worked closely with the sales team to make sure that the content gave the right details with the right feeling  – but also tracks well with Google.

Notaro Windows is a family run business – and they don’t get much more family involved than this! A great bunch of people who are completely focused on doing the best possible job for their customers. It is a real pleasure to work with them and give them a website that reflects who they are and what they do.

If you are lucky enough to live in Somerset you should definitely get Notaros around, you can’t fail but be drawn in to their friendly yet professional approach and commitment. www.notarowindows.com

Imagine our excitement then to be asked to create a website and flash application so that the good people at Digital Interiors could launch their innovative TV concealing system – called Chameleon.

The concept is simple - hide your television behind a work of art. When you want to watch TV the canvas will roll up by pressing a button on your remote, and similarly when you’ve finished you can roll the canvas down again. Easy and elegant – what more could you ask for?

Chameleon AV have a number of prints that they have licensed ranging from Monet to Manet with a couple of modern images in the selection. But what is especially great is that you can use your own image as the backdrop. And with children as beautifully photogenic as mine who need a Van Gogh?

To get this idea across we put together a selector that let’s users select the frame they like and the print to see what it would look like. They can also use their own images from their computer to see how they would look (but nothing is sent across the internet so it is lightening fast).

Have a go yourself!

Head over to the Chameleon AV. website to find out more.

The rest of the site was a nice simple construction getting across the in and out of the product and listing on a google map application where customers can find their very own Chameleon stockist – which now include Harrods and Selfridges!!

Key features

• WordPress powered content management system
• Bespoke website design to suit Chameleon’s branding
• Bucket loads of image manipulation
• Flash header for homepage
• Flash application for the product selection
• Google Maps application
• Search Engine Optimisation tools for each page

Heather’s work is visually very striking. It won’t be every one’s cup of tea (and she has a piece by the same name!) but for those who do appreciate her deliberately unsettling work the site offers a chance to view her recent works in a simple and uncomplicated way.

To really bring the works to the viewer crops of the current portfolio are used on each page and the site’s homepage is dominated by one of her works. The entire purpose of the cleanly designed website is to bring the work to the visitor so that they might contact Heather to find out more about her work.

Equally important was that the site should be easily maintained and updated with new work as it comes along. It is fair to say that Heather is infinitely more comfortable with a canvas than a computer and the system behind the web site is as unfussy as the web site it produces, leaving Heather more time to paint.

The next installments on the site will be an archive of older works. Definitely worth the wait!

*** Update ***

Google Analytics (something that is included in every website we build) showed some really interesting trends. The main one was that a lot of traffic was coming out of Facebook. This was not something that Heather wanted to include in the site but on spotting the trend the new Facebook ‘Like’ buttons have been put on each piece so that Facebookers can promote Heather’s pieces to each other.

1. Add a function to the theme to call a thumbnail image from each post:

<?php
     // Displays post image for the sidebar.
     // Sizes can be; thumbnail, medium, full)
  function side_th_image($postid=0, $size='thumbnail', $attributes='') {
   if ($postid<1) $postid = get_the_ID();
    if ($images = get_children(array(
     'post_parent' => $postid,
     'post_type' => 'attachment',
     'numberposts' => 1,
     'post_mime_type' => 'image',)))

     foreach($images as $image) {
      $attachment=wp_get_attachment_image_src($image->ID, $size);
      ?><?php echo $attachment[0]; ?><?php
     }
  }
?>

2. Now we need to call in these thumbnails to the sidebar. This will most likely be outside of the Wordpress loop. In this case we are using this to link to the post.

<ul>
  <?php  global $post;
         $myposts = get_posts('category=1&numberposts=5&orderby=rand');
         foreach($myposts as $post) : ?>
            <li><img src="<?php side_th_image($post->ID); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); "></li>
         <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

And that’s it. Easy peasey. Of course make sure that you’ve got styles to cover this (the thumbnails don’t look good with a bullet point infront of them!). And even better this can be reused for a category page. NB you don’t need $post->ID inside the brackets if this is appearing inside the loop.

Why not visit her site to see this in action, and while your there take a look at her provoking pieces! www.heatherjanewallace.com