We’ve just launched a new website for our client Anderson Communications: www.andersoncommunications.co.uk.  It is a nice clean modern design, pretty straight forward website, written in CSS.  We created the initial concept using photoshop, once the client had approved the visuals we then set to work coding the site.

The whole project took about 10 working days from start to stop, it is a great web design; uncluttered and clean, very in-keeping with the client’s brand.
It’s live now, so we wish Anderson Communications all the best with their shiny new site and look forward to working with them again in the future.

The team at JC Peters are pleased to welcome on board Link-Lease UK as a new client.  Link Lease provide vehicle contract hire to businesses and private individuals.  We have also been engaged to provide SEO services once the site has been launched.

We have some great web design ideas and will be starting to prepare some visuals next week.  The brief form the client is to produce a quality site with a modern clean design to help the brand stand out in a very crowded market place.  The site will have a completely bespoke CMS system, allowing the client to quickly and easily add/edit or delete new car deals live on line, we have written similar sites to this one in the past and have a good understanding of the client’s industry sector.

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Click to view the main site: www.jcpeters.co.uk

We have a great offer available on web hosting, through our partner company AGL-Host we are able to offer a 20% discount on all web hosting packages.  It is available to bother businesses and private individuals.

Web hosting packages start from £1.99 per and upwards (depending on your requirements), for example the £1.99 package includes the following:

• 250 Mb disc space
• 2.5 Gb bandwidth each month
• 10 email addresses
• 2 MySQL databases
• Online control Panel
• Web mail access

All of our clients web designs have been hosted with AGL for a fair few years now and we use them because they offer a good reliable service.  In order to claim the discount you’ll need a discount code to enter at the checkout when purchasing your hosting package.  Please visit the AGL site to see the different web hosting packages available: www.agl-host.co.uk.  Please email me to get the discount code to apply:  marketing@jcpeters.co.uk.

At Jc Peters we do all of our design work on Macs (because pc’s are completely useless and unstable platforms, today we installed Apple’s new operating system, Snow Leopard on all of our systems.  Usually installing Apple upgrades is seamless and smooth, however this time, we’ve spent all day looking for new drivers that haven’t been released yet!!.

We do all of our web design work using Photoshop, dreamweaver and Flash CS3 – we’ve found out today that CS3 doesn’t work with Snow Leopard.  So aswell as wasting a whole day looking for drivers for printers etc – we now need to go out and buy CS4 – which is pretty expensive.

RRRRRRRR – very frustrating day – and it it seems very expensive!

Why Can’t we coders speak English?…………

When designing a website, it generally falls into two halves:

1. The design: this is where the graphic designer comes up with a fancy piece of artwork – the ‘concept’ for the website.
2. The coding: this is the next bit, after the client has approved the visuals or concept, the coders take over and do all the clever programming that makes the site a real working ‘thing’

I’m a designer, my point is…why is it that after I’ve come up with a great looking design approved by the client that the coders will come up with a long list of technical reasons why the design will be very difficult to code as a website.  Coders seem to have this assumed intellectual superiority, those clever little bods are so hyper intelligent that their massive brains talk in a mathmatical type language.  If anyone cannot understand this quick fire bombardment of complexities then they are of course stupid and not worth communicating with.

Generally, these strange super-brained creatures are best kept well away from clients.  They have a habit of upsetting clients as they don’t release that they can be a trifle demeaning!.

I’m just a humble designer > so no doubt all you coders out there will shoot me down in flames.  We’ve got a fair few projects on the boil at the moment > so should update the portfolio soon> www.jcpeters.co.uk

W3C is the latest watch word for web design standards, it means sites that adhere to standards of user functionality and ease of use.  After 12 years are pretty awful looking sites it is nice to see a pretty little badge that you can display on your website to show that it adheres to W3C standards.  the standard also refers to whats under the bonnet: i.e the code that is used to write or construct the website should be neatly arranged and free from errors and sloppy mistakes.

In summary it is set of ‘rules’ that when they are incorporate into the design and construction result in a nice looking, easy to use website.  In order to be able to pass the standards you must submit your site to the W3C validation site – this site then scans the CSS & XHTML for your website and if it is clean, it presents you with a nice little banner that you can use on your website.  If it is not, you are presented with a list of errors that need rectifying before they will approve your site.

Is it of any use?? – yes in short. It makes using the internet a much nicer experience, how frustrating is it when you want to purchase something online and the site that stocks your product is so awful that it makes it impossible to navigate through the site and successfully make your purchase.

I think it will take a few years before all of the terrible old dinosaur websites disappear, but in the meantime, always look for the little badge.  It means that the owners of the website really care about your experience of using their site and generally this means they will provide a good service form throughout your journey with them as a contact or supplier.

As you probably gathered, we’ve got the little badge on our site: www.jcpeters.co.uk

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Another week, another website launched.  We’ve just finished working with Karen Moore at Lets Go For Growth, on their new website.  We’ve just completed the new site and launched the new site: www.growmysmallbusiness.co.uk.

The brief was to come up with a new site that reflected the company’s brand image and successfully presented the platform of services available for small businesses in the area.  From our design studios in Northamptonshire we came up with a web design concept that really  built upon the existing site used by Lets Go For Growth.  The client was very happy with the end result and as a piece of design it works well.

The site was built using PHP 5, which is generally our coding language of choice for dynamic websites.  It is straight forward to work with and very responsive, it also produces nice clean code that Google likes.

The site also has a complete CMS system (customer maintenance system), which allows the client to quickly and easily edit any text on the website in realtime.  It is a really easy & fast system and any changes are made in realtime, the beauty is that it is exactly the same as using microsoft word.  The front end is very familiar to most viewers, all of the clever stuff happens behind the scenes, meaning the client doesn’t need any web coding knowledge to use the system.

Check out the site and see what you think…..its very Orange!!!.  If you’d like to see some more examples of our website design, please visit our own site, where we have a full portfolio of recently completed design porjects: www.jcpeters.co.uk

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