Think of summer by the pool at this beautiful French gite in the Dordogne

If in the depths of this grey, wet winter you are planning your summer holiday in the sun, you'd do well to pop along to view the website of "L'Ancien Chai". This beautiful old wine store has been lovingly renovated as a holiday gite.

L'Ancien Chai has 4 bedrooms which sleep up to 8 people in comfort and is available to rent all year round. The gite is well-appointed and stocked and the owners have given every consideration to making your holiday a perfect, relaxing experience.

This lovely French holiday gite has its own shared swimming pool and tennis court, and adult bicycles are available to borrow. The house is well-stocked with DVDs, jigsaw puzzles, games and CDs. It is close to the small village of Lusignac, and Bordeaux (120km), Bergerac (70km) and Angouleme (50km)are all within travelling distance.

Closeby are the pre-historic caves of Grottes de Villars (to the east). Nearby historic and popular places to visit include Brantonne, Aubeterre-sur-Dronne and Bourdeilles.

Why not browse the image gallery for this French gite to hire in the Dordogne on the website.

The website was created by Chadwick Design. You may view other examples of our work in our website design porfolio.

Agent Friendly Pages

Musicians, comedians, tribute bands, magicians, mobile discos, steel bands and other entertainers frequently use a number of different booking agents to publicise their services. Each agent, naturally wants visitors to make the bookings through their website rather than contacting the artists direct.

The solution is the "agent-friendly" website. This is a single web page with all the artist's details and which may also include embedded video, an image gallery or media player to help "sell" the artist's talents. What the page omits is the contact artist's own details.

This means that a number of different agents can provide a link to the artist's page. Visitors seeking entertainment for a party, wedding or event, can get a feel for what each artist can provide, but if they decide they wish to make a booking, they must go through the agent who gave them the link, rather than direct to the band, comedian, disco roadshow or tribute act.

Two examples of "agent-friendly" pages created in Chads Web Studio are for Phil Perry, a magician and The Kommitments - a tribute band for the film "the Commitments".
If you'd like to know more about our agent-friendly pages, please call Chadwick Design on 01780 740893 or visit our website : www.chadswebstudio.co.uk

A Comfy Night's Sleep

The best brand name mattresses, at the best price and delivered to your door next day free of charge?

Think you must be dreaming?

Not if you've visited Mattresses Direct Online, a Peterborough-based mattress store who deliver nationwide, guarantee never to be beaten on price and offer free next day delivery on all the mattresses they have in stock.

They sell all the big names including Silent Night, Tempur, Breasley, Dunlopillo, Kaymed, Slumberland, Rest Assured and Sealy mattresses.

Mattresses Direct Online came to Chads Web Studio to have their existing website redesigned and to provide an E-commerce solution for them.

Building a bespoke E-commerce website, we created a simple navigation system which allows the purchaser to shop by mattress size, by mattress manufacturer or by mattress type. We used an accordion-style navigation bar so visitors can see the three shopping options immediately and are not overwhelmed by choice!

Each mattress is shown with details including the size, width, manufacturer, construction type and firmness. The size and firmness-rating are displayed graphically so visitors may compare available mattresses at a glance.

Depending on the time of day, visitors to Mattresses Direct Online are greeted with Good Morning... Good Afternoon... or Good Evening.

In design terms, we believe it is important for the website to sell not just mattresses, but the idea of a comfy, good night's sleep. To this end we used a dark blue night-sky background and a fade-image show of images all showing people snuggled up asleep in comfortable beds. These are combined with a simple, unfussy, modern design.

To view other E-commerce websites designed by Chads Web Studio, please visit our portfolio.

The Beauty of Natural Stone

Atelier 109 is a small collective of highly qualified stonemasons which creates and builds medium size projects in natural stone. Their projects range from beautifully hand crafted fireplaces to stone staircases in French Limestone and Portland stone to renovation projects and new builds where their traditional stonemason's skills are used to create superb, long-lasting stone window mullions, doorways, chimneys and walls and floors in a variety of stone.

The client had a clear idea of the style he wanted for his website design, preferring a pale limestone grey pallet and a clean, uncluttered appearance. He had a requirement for a large number of photographs to be displayed, linked to separate pages of the website. At Chads Web Design Studio, we therefore made use of the Lightbox style gallery which allows links to multiple images, either from thumbnails or from text links, and the images pop up to display over the underlying page. This meant that from 4 visible thumbnails on the traditional stonework page, we are able to display 4 separate galleries totaling 60 photos.

Displaying images in this way also means that each page of the site can be compact and contained within a screen resolution of 1024 x768 and nothing is lost "below the fold".

Special attention was given to search engine optimisation for this website for stonemasons. After just two weeks the whole site has been indexed by Google and Atelier109.co.uk is coming up number one for the search string "Ketton Stone Fireplaces", "Ketton Stone staircases" and number 3 for "stone fireplace maker" and "stone staircase maker".

To learn more about search engine optimisation or to see other examples of our work, please visit Chads Web Studio.

A Vision of Elvis

Elvis Tribute artist, Rob Kingsley, better known as "a Vision of Elvis", was looking for a clean, simple website with photo gallery, media player and embedded video. The purpose of the site is to showcase his talents to promoters, theaters and larger venues who might be interested in booking his tribute to Elvis Presley show.

At Chads Web Design Studio we created a 7 page website where photos of Rob Kingsley were allowed to speak for themselves, showing what an incredible Elvis look-a-like Rob is.

In order to give a taster of Rob Kingsley's stage performance, we included an embedded YouTube video of one of a Vision of Elvis's shows and a media player with clips of a number of his live songs.

The photo gallery also helps to create the flavour of a Rob Kingsley stage performances with many shots taken during live shows with his band. The fabulous range of Elvis costumes used by Rob in his shows can also be seen here, many of which are imported direct from America.

The site also includes a brief history of the Elvis Aaron Presley story from his birth in 1935, through his rise to fame, his 33 successful film appearances and his 150 album awards to his death in 1977. The information shows Rob Kingsley's commitment to Presley and his knowledge of Elvis's background, all of which inform his performance and make him a realistic Elvis impersonator. In order to ensure that Rob Kingsley remains the focus of the website even on this page, the information is contained within a scrolling section and the page is dominated by an ever present close-up of Rob in full costume.

Chads Web Studio also designed a promotional poster suitable to be sent out to theatres and venues in sizes ranging from A5 to A0 size. The poster design helped to brand the website so that venue owners would recognise this particular Elvis impersonator from his promotional material.

To view more websites designed for musicians and tribute artists, please visit Chads Web Studio.