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Archive for April 2009
Catch Up On The Buzz
Meet Buzz, our newest staff member! Buzz has come all the way from Bleep Labs in Austin, Texas. Still a bit shy, he spends most of his time in the cupboard looking after the stationery. It won’t be long before he’s answering the phone, but getting him to make a brew might be a bit of a struggle.
Another Cool Product
Here’s another quick turnaround flier for Shave Ice. This time it’s a six page third A4 flier extolling the virtues of their flagship product Hawaiian Ice® to prospective customers. The flier design follows the theme of previous materials we have produced for Shave Ice, focussing on the Hawaiian ice® brand we developed for them. The product illlustration takes centre stage on the inner spread of the leaflet demonstrating the Hawaiian Ice® profit model. The raw material costs are just 11p per serving for the flower cup and straw spoon, and 22p for the flavour syrups. With a recommended retail price of £2 each portion of Hawaiian Ice® sold represents a typical gross profit margin of 83.5% for the retailer.
Web Design For Designer Cakes
Wedding and celebration specialists The Cake Room have finally got a website. Launched this afternoon the site features a number of portfolio pages showing the diversity of cakes they offer, as well as background information about the company and an interactive map pulled in from the Google Maps API.
The site has been a while in development, simply because the folks at The Cake Room have been so busy baking and decorating the finest party cakes in East Yorkshire. As a result the design and development of their website came fairly low down their list of priorities. The absence of an online presence meant that prospective customers trying to track them down in Google were clicking through to our own site.
The case study elsewhere on our own website covering the corporate identity we designed for The Cake Room has been achieving high rankings, driving their customers to us in the search for contact details. Hopefully the website will now top ours in Google searches, and the busy bakers will be even more so as a reult!
The Cake Room web site can be visited at www.thecakeroom.co.uk. Don’t forget to tell ’em we sent ya!
Flash CoverFlow For St. Stephen’s
St. Stephen’s is Hull’s (relatively) new flagship shopping centre. They have recently launched their new website with front-end design by our good friends at Bryce Mennell.
Rear entrance to St. Stephen’s shopping centre in Hull city centre.
The website is driven by Vicinitee Retail, a content management system (CMS) used by several shopping centres and retail parks. The website design features an iTunes style CoverFlow widget which allows users to scroll through the logos of the various retail brands represented within St. Stephen’s, clicking through to the corresponding store’s web pages.
We were called in to provide the Flash expertise. The basic coverflow application was provided by a royalty free Flash component. Although the component was developed to be user-configurable it didn’t fully support dynamically generated content out of the box.
After a bit of hacking we persuaded the Flash component to accept a fully dynamic data source, proving once again that we are East Yorkshire’s go-to guys when it comes to tricky Flash problems!
Subscribe »Why Do We have A Blog?
There are several very good reasons why we have incorporated a blog into our web site. It’s relatively simple to do after all.
- A blog is great tool for quickly adding new content to a web site. We chose WordPress, and its ease of use means we are more likely to keep updating the site on a regular basis, whenever one of us has ten minutes to spare.
- Visitors like fresh content. Keeping the site updated will encourage people to come back again and again. It all helps when building an online presence and winning customer mindshare.
- Search engines like fresh content too. As long as we keep it relevant it all counts towards ratings.
- We’re creative types, and blogging is form of self-expression. When we’ve got something to say it won’t do to bottle it up.
- We’re good at what we do, and blogging about it is way of proving it to the world.
It all makes sense doesn’t it. Perhaps you should have a blog on your web site. Don’t think about it for too long though - give us a call…