Contracted by Palm Hotels & Leisure Consultants who specialise in business consultancy and management of hotels and Lodges in Southern Africa to design and develop a website with content management, booking system and seo strategy for Echo Travel Lodge, a 3 star lodge located on the Trans Kalahari highway in Botswana.

Provided the client with SEO strategy, photography for the website on site, content management system, bespoke reservations and bookings system, website design and development.

view project »

Interactive flash actionscript website development and design for a London based contemporary artist.

I was contracted by Bruce Chidovori, a leading contemporary artist on the London scene to develop a website for him that would help promote his work, allow him to update and display his work online through the use of a custom built bespoke content management system developed in house for Deegan Art.

The website had to be interactive, engage to the user while being easy to navigate and usable. In designing the website, I brought together different aspects linked to Bruce such his cultural heritage, interests, likes and dislikes and merged them together creating a fusion of pleasurable aesthetics.

I also produced a corporate identity for Bruce to use with the promotion of his work and website, designed banner ads which were featured at his gallery viewings in the heart of London and promotional flyers and material.

view project »

view website » [offline]

It’s been 2 whole weeks since I’ve had my Media Temple grid service hosting account and so far I’m loving it. Although I did have a few problems with my Urchin stats from the start of my service (500 error page), a (mt) technical assistant was able to have the issue sorted out within 24hrs of when I sent out an email to them which is quicker than my other hosting provider (not naming names) has responded to emails.

The control panel is intuitive, well layed out, easy to navigate and beatiful. They have a great designer or team of designers at media temple. The only down side I’ve found with the account centre is that it can be very slow, I mean annoyingly slow reminiscent of the days of dial up. Well, maybe I’m exagerating a little there but it could seriously do with a little boost.

The one touch install is just brilliant, saves you a lot of time and effort configuring files especially for users who don’t have the knowledge to manually install the relevant sites or blogs offered but would like to use them.

Being a web developer, it also gives me a lot of control over what I can do with the websites I build. It doesn’t give you as much control as you’ld have with a dedicated server but you definately get a lot for the money you pay and for most people, it definately gives you more control than you can shake a stick at. I’m eagerley anticipating the launch of the (cs) Cluster-Server in Q4 of 2008(any day now) which will be the successor to the grid-service and hopefuly most of the issues currently on the grid-service will be ironed out.

Another plus for the grid-service is it allows you to host upto 100 domains in one account without any extra charges and every one of those domains can have a database each, allowing you to host all your sites, your friends sites and even client sites if you wanted too. I don’t know about you, but I have a number of websites which are hosted by different providers and for the same services (often less) that i get with the media temple grid service but are a lot more expensive. On average, I’m paying near enough the same amount of money if not more every month for the hosting of one domain than I am for multiple domains on the grid service.

I took a gamble when going for the media temple grid service as I had read a lot of bad reviews online about website downtime and other issues, but liked the look of the site so much and wanted to give their control panel a go. So far I haven’t experienced any downtime on my site (hoping it stays that way) and the customer service has been absolutely phenomenal, a lot better than expected.

Media Temple grid service if far from perfect, but which hosting provider or package is? For the amount of goodies you get with the (gs), although I find the account centre (control panel) slow, $20 dollars a month is a bargain and well justified.

For now, I’m loving the hosting and (mt) definately get my vote.

Amongst other things, I’ve also been developing my iPhone specific website which I’ll hopefuly be launching in the not so distant future (knowing me, that’ll  probably be in the 1st quarter of 2009, lol). As I haven’t had much time to re-design my site, I’ve decided to keep my old portfolio site (freshening it up a bit of course) and build an iPhone site to compliment it and allow iPhone users to sort of get the same effects as the iPhone doesn’t have flash unfortunately.

Working tirelessly to get the blog completed so should be done pretty soon, fingers crossed… now where’s that cup of coffee?

I’ll also be throwing in a few reviews, tutorials and creative digital media related posts, so feel free to subscribe to my rss feed and keep up to date with henry moyo..

World wide web here, I come!