Jezweb Australian Website Design

We've begun the process of creating a website for Newcastle Fire, Health & Safety.

One of the company owners, Michelle, created an excellent draft document for us to work from and a basic logo concept.

It looks humble but it provides us an insight into how Michelle visualises the website layout, their prefered colours, mix of product photo on the homepage, incorporation of the FPA logo and a simple menu structure. The possibility of us creating a design that is in tune with the draft and thus reaching agreement on the final draft and ultimately the website very quickly is likely.

The first stage is to redesign, modernise, the logo. It looks bright and bold as it is but very two dimensional and the square corners and sharp serif typeface make the logo hard to look at as an overall image. It's very distracting to look at and whilst the primary colours are vivid and exciting we need to either reduce their intensity or the number of colours so that it looks more singular.

The draft ideas in our first round, 9 of them are:

Once we all agree on a logo then we will proceed to the website layout design.

I have some basic signage setup outside my home office in Wallsend, Newcastle. There are a few photos on the Newcastle Infotech facebook page. An a-frame that we put out each day. A small flag that indicates we are open. A 'we're open' sign that goes in the window and a strip of lettering on the wall that says, 'websites and computers : 49501140'. It seems to be working quite well, we average 3 new computer repair jobs each week as a direct result of the signage. Often they are only minor issues such as replacing a laptop keyboard, sale of a usb thumb drive, cleaning the dust out of a machine to reduce its running temperature. Occasionally we have a warranty issue or sometimes people need a little advice or when they have a faulty lcd screen or tv we can direct them to newcastle quik fix.

All the signage was completed by Rick at Candy Man Signs. It's working well.

Many of the products have been added to the new shopping cart website. The design is as per the company style, colours and artwork. Simple, easy to read.

http://www.argypets.com.au/shop/

If there are pet supplies you have been thinking of buying the prices on argypets.com.au are very reasonable and you can visit the store in Glendale if you prefer a hands on buying experience.

www.zenanawomen.com.au

The business is based on the premis that:

Zenana Women is an ethical clothing label, a social enterprise operated by women to benefit women. Our clothes are designed in Australia for Australian women and their lives. They are stitched in India, using quality fabrics and craftsmanship, and featuring the traditional hand-done embroidery of the Indian city of Lucknow.

It's like Fair Trade which reminded me of a website we created about 2 years ago which was dedicated to being a Free Trade shop for a range of products, Global Conduct: www.globalconduct.com.au

I recently had a client ask me about an associates website that I was told ...his son set up his web site with all his competitors listed in invisible ink on his site.... a This is deception and contrary to the webmaster guidelines.

If google finds out they will be removed from the search listings.

See:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#quality

and specifically in the case of ‘invisible ink’

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.

Not a good idea and we won't be doing anything like this with the sites we manage.

I was quite surprised to discover the number of enthusiast British Seagull outboard motor owners there are in the world. There are even a few regatta's in New Zealand and the UK that are specifically for British Seagull owners.

Richard Minard has a stockpile of original and remanufactured parts that he is selling and the website is designed to generate enquiries:

www.britishseagull.com.au

Bright bold and easy to read.

www.wpc.org.au

Just uploaded the new design for WPC, lot more stylish and in the gold colour they prefer that coordinates with the club uniform and branding.

Before

wpc website before makeover

After

wpc website after makeover

Still some extra text information to be added to the site and the videos to be uploaded to utube.

I've got the blog sorted out so that I can very easily send a new blog article from my phone to the blog.

This process works just as well with an email sent from any device really but the phone is the comms device that i always have with me.

Using the email function of my phone I send an email to a designated email address on my domain

The subject of the email is the title of the blog

The body of the email message is the text and if i attach an image it inserts after the text. Don't seem to be able to send email from my phone with multiple image attachments though.

There is a cron job running on the website that checks the email address for entries and if one with the correct characteristics is in the mailbox then the blog will process it an add to the website.

All works quite neatly and i can see some potential business and sport applications for this in the future.

For example. The dragon boat or outrigger club i could setup so that members can submit their paddling stories via their phone.

Or, a gardening maintenance company could report back to clients and show them that the yard work was complete. We could include some special variables that are read from the email message that designate perhaps the customer id or a job id, or both.

Or, someone on holidays or touring around the country, or internationally, could add blog entries showing up to date info on where they are, what they are doing etc. Which would be kinda neat if you were say on a bike ride across the USA and you wanted to keep friends and family at home up to date on how you are progressing without contacting them individually.

All very simple and very cool and as the handheld communication and computing devices get more sophisticated and easy to use i can see some very clear business cases for using this sort of reporting system.