Chads Web Studio

Viva Language Services

2009-11-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

At Chadwick Design we were given the brief to design a website for Viva Language Services, a Peterborough-based company which offers Spanish lessons to both children and adults.

The client showed us several websites which they liked, all of which shared a few common themes. Many of them were tidy and compact, having a large central box into which all the information was fitted. Many were also very colourful and used bright colours for the text/navigation bars. Seeing other sites the client likes, helps us to get a feel for the style of design they are hoping for.

We used a large image of a Spanish beach as a background image for the body of the site. This was photoshopped so it would run to a solid colour at the bottom and would tile horizontally, thus covering the largest space possible, (no matter how big the computer screen it was viewed on) while the image itself would remain small so it would load quickly.

The supplied pages of copy were split up into the sections “Tuition”, “Online Learning”, “Testimonials” and “Translation”. As well as these subheadings, we also added a contact page with a contact form to hide the company email address from the spam robots.

We chose the images and colours carefully to make the website look vibrant and fun. For the text and headers, however, we used mainly red and yellow/bronze to suggest the Spanish flag. The items on the navigation bar were given separate classes so that each button could be styled with a different colour.

The “Bienvenido a VLS” image was created in our studio, based on a stock image of a face drawn on a blackboard. We added the “a VLS” to personalise the image. We suggested using an embedded video of a flamenco guitarist on the homepage to give the site a Spanish ambiance, but suggested that the space could just as easily be filled with a video of a Spanish tutorial when the client has the budget to do this.

The VLS logo was chosen from a possible choice of six designed in our studio and the “Call VLS” icon was also created from scratch.

Each of the pages contains different text and a different set of images, but we aimed to give them all a common theme; using a similar layout for each and the same header and navigation bar for every page. The images of the flamenco guitarist and dancer above the navigation bar are archetypical of Spain but also seem lively and colourful, appealing both to adults and children.

The website was optimised for local searches based around the services offered by Viva Language Services, so searching in Google for the phrases along the lines of "Spanish Lessons Peterborough" brings up the website on page one.

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

2008-12-06T06:41:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-17T08:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-09-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T03:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Creating a Splash in your Bathroom!

2008-07-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

Bathstorm.com is a new business selling high quality contemporary and traditional bathroom suites and bathroom accessories from its showroom near Stamford in Lincolnshire. They are keen to develop their online presence and to compete with established bathroom suppliers on the net.
They had already created a website for themselves using an Actinic template, but recognised that this did not give them the professional appearance necessary to create trust in their brand as an online shop.

Bathstorm.com came to Chads Web Studio for help. We gave advice on how to optimise their website themselves and then redesigned the site to give a fresh, modern look to rival that of their main competitors.

We simplified their navigation system and added an imageshow of bathroom suites to show the quality of their products. We chose a bright, watery blue as the main colour, but kept everything else simple, using a white background to each page of the site, and a wet-look water-splash background to the outside of the website.

The prices and other highlighted text was changed from the rather angry red they were using to a more modern orange. Custom graphics were created for links to their "Price Match Promise", "Free Delivery", "Email a Friend" and "Help Centre".

Chads Web Studio also developed custom scripting to work out automatically discounts when the RRP ws entered and to display the resulting discounted price in orange, with the RRP price displayed in black but with a line scored through. This significantly reduced their work load when changing discounts on products.

The photographs for the "Best-selling items" and for "Special Offers" were enlarged and bespoke scripting applied to ensure that each of these images appeared at the same width and were cropped to display at a maximum height. This standardised the display of these products and neatened the overall look of the home page.

Learning to Love the Environment

2008-07-01T08:38:00.000-07:00

CEES is the Environmental Education Service arm of Cambridgeshire County Council. It works in conjunction with Eco-Centres and Cambridgeshire Outdoors to help schools to bring learning about the environment to life.

CEES aims to encourage an understanding of sustainable lifestyles and to improve children's knowledge of the environment through first-hand experience.

CEES required a redesign for their existing website. They wanted a colourful website which would showcase their work and also provide extensive information on the various courses available to Cambridgeshire schools at its four centres based in Stibbington, Upware, Wisbech and Coldham. They also wanted to provide downloadable resources for teachers to use in the classroom.

Taking the existing CEES logo (which is blue and green) as a starting point, we created a design which suggests sky and earth, with a graded blue header and a grass footer. Drop-down CSS menus make all 30 pages accessible from the home page and also make them easily navigable by search engines.

The Courses for Every Class pages on the CEES website all contain tables of information specified by the site owner. These are all coded to meet W3C Accessibilty Standards.

The centres' pages all required several images, but had only a small amount of accompanying text. In order to display the images at a good size, we used a rotating fade-image show on each of these pages.

CEES also wished to be able to update one section of the website themselves: the CEES News, Views & Events page. For this we installed an online editor with a simple admin interface which permits the site owner to add text, tables and links themselves.

The website was created in Chads Web Studio near Stamford, Lincs

Floating on Air.... well on helium actually!

2008-06-02T09:11:00.000-07:00

Floating on Air.... Well on helium actually!

The Balloon Gallery is a family-run business in Holbeach in Lincolnshire supplying high-quality balloon decorations for parties, weddings, corporate events and special occasions. They came to Chads Web Studio for one of our small business website packages in order to gain their first web presence.

The brief which the Balloon Gallery gave was very specific in terms of what they wanted their website to achieve, but the only design specification given was that the site should use the company colours which are deep pink and purple.

They particularly wanted the website to convey the quality of their products, designs and creations, rather than simply shout "Party Balloons!".

In order to achieve this, we combined the colours of magenta, purple and gold. Our website design centers around the idea of a special gift, so the navigation bar is a gold ribbon, wrapped around a graded purple background. All the images used on the site were given a gold border.

In order to show as many of the balloon designs as possible, we used fade-image shows on every page. We also provided a light-box gallery so that visitors may browse through photographs of the helium balloon creations and see many of them in situ at special events. This gives an impression of how balloon decorations may used to transform parties, weddings and corporate and other special events.

The website consists of 6 simple pages: the home page, a page outlining the types of occasions when balloon decorations might be used, examples of the styles of decorations which the Balloon Gallery can supply, (including exotically named "fantasy clouds", "sculptured hearts", "topiary trees" and "balloon bouquets") , a list of Frequently Asked questions and a contact page.

The Balloon-Gallery website is search engine-friendly, created using the latest web-standards and is accessible to all.

In common with every website created in Chads Web Studio, basic search-engine optimisation on www.balloon-gallery.co.uk was included in the small business website package price as standard.

To see more examples of small business websites created in the Chads Web Studio, please visit our portfolio.

2008-05-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

A Real Tribute

Morningside Management specialise in the management of tribute bands and tribute artists. At present they have 12 high-quality tribute acts on their books including tributes to Jimi Hendrix, Neil Diamond, Evis, The Police, Blondie and Bob Marley. In May 2008 they decided that it was time to showcase the talents of their tribute acts on the web.

Steve Barker, the founder of Morningside Management, had a very clear vision of what he wanted his website to achieve and gave a very specific brief for what is should look like. At Chad's Web Studio we were delighted to translate his ideas into a functioning web design.

Steve specifically requested that the Morningside logo should brand every page and remain static so that even on a page which scrolled, this branding would not be lost. He also wanted the design to be reminiscent of his existing letterhead, using the same colours and a parchment-style backgound to each page. He described to us his vision of the design with a header filling the full width of the screen, a central "page" with grey bands to either side.

On the home page, Steve wanted only a brief amount of text, yet he also wanted to display the publicity posters for all 12 tribute artists on Morningside Management's books. To achieve this we created a fade image show, with a clickable link on each individual image taking visitors to further details on each artist.

Steve was also keen to have visitors to his site directed through a page listing every one of the artists he manages, feeling that someone looking for a Neil Diamond Tribute act, might also be tempted by a Jimi Hendrix Tribute if they saw the details for this act too. The website therefore has a drop-down menu of all the artists represented and on choosing an act from this list, the visitor is taken to that artist's section of a general tribute artists' page. Each tribute band has its own section on the page with a picture and very brief details. From here it is just one further click to a dedicate page on the chosen artist offering further details.

Each artist's page contains a publicity shot, a write-up on their show and testimonials, together with a YouTube video embedded in the page. Steve had asked for a simple link to YouTube, but was impressed by our suggestion that the videos should be embedded in his website. This means visitors are not taken out of his website to view the video and more importantly, they don't get distracted by all the others offered on You Tube!

At Morningside Management the team were sufficiently impressed with our design to recommend us to two of the tribute acts they manage. John Hylton is the force behind two tribute acts: the Real Diamond is the only Neil Diamond Tribute act preforming in UK Theatres and Homeward Bound is a tribute to Simon & Garfunkel. At Chads Web Studio, we redesigned John's website to give a flavour of his shows and to help improve his ranking with the search engines.

For other examples of music websites created in the Chads Web Studio, please visit our music websites portfolio.

Train Commuters Community Website

2008-03-01T06:32:00.000-08:00

TalkLoco - Website for Train Commuters
The aim of Talkloco.co.uk is to give voice to the thousands of commuters who use the rail network on a daily basis. Anyone who travels by train will understand the frustration of dirty carriages, late service, frustrating waits on cold platforms, service interruptions at holiday times, awkward arrivals and departure boards and high ticket prices. Yet how can travellers voice their concerns, annoyance and frustrations... or indeed their pleasure when the service is good?

The answer now is www.TalkLoco.co.uk, a website especially for the train commuter. This website is in its infancy, having only gone live at the end of February, but already there is a petition gathering signatures on the concerns over the removal of Departure Information at Kings Cross.

The site accepts petition ideas from visitors and will feed the information this gathers back to the train companies and so commuters will have the chance to get their opinion known where it counts.

TalkLoco also has a forum for registered members to make their opinions known, to organise lift shares and to advertise job vacancies. Registration is free, so what are you waiting for?!

Along with topical articles on trains, travel and commuting, there are quick polls and useful links for journey planning and contact details for every Train Operating Company.

The website utilises a content management system, allowing the site-owner to add pictures and content themselves and also to assign permissions to allow selected registered users to contribute articles if they wish.

This Community Website was designed and built by Chads Web Studio.

Web Design For Florists & Flower Arrangers

2008-02-22T06:56:00.001-08:00

The beauty of floral arrangements is their very transience... they are glorious to look at, often smell fabulous and make the heart soar, but they don't last long. What's more, every floral arrangement is unique, created with a combination of flowers chosen especially for a special event or just to complement a room.

If you are a florist, how can you capture this fleeting beauty to be able to showcase your talents to potential new customers?

The obvious answer is with photography, but having to print out large numbers of photos to send to clients is expensive and time consuming. With the advent of the digital camera, there is a far better way... display them on your website.

What about this display... looks good enough to eat doesn't it!

A brochure website is ideal for a small business such as a Florist. An online presence gives credibility to any small business, and a photo-rich site with a gallery of photos is a cost-effective way to display sample floral designs. Photos can be easily added to a gallery, so there are always new creations for visitors to enjoy.

So, where do you start?

Find yourself a specialist web designer. If you are a florist you have all the artistic flair to create fabulous floral arrangements, but the likelihood that you also have the skills needed to really show off those talents on the web are unlikely. People pay you to create floral designs for their special day because they recognise that they cannot arrange flowers like a professional flower arranger! The same applies to the creation of a website design.. leave it to the experts, who will create something special.

Starting with 6 pages for a florist website is a great beginning. Any fewer and you are unlikely to ever get found in the search engines, but this number gives you the chance to display your wares attractively! You will always be able to add more pages as your business flourishes.

Here are some suggestions for pages you might consider choosing for your site, depending on the services you offer:

Home
About Us
Wedding Flowers
Seasonal Displays
Party & Events Flowers
Corporate Flower Arrangements
Business Floral Arrangements
Home flower Arrangements
Biography
Testimonials
Contact Page
Gallery
Links

See an example of a picture-rich small-business florist website.

FlowersbyLizz.co.uk was designed in Chads Web Studio in Stamford, Lincolnshire.