This post has been sitting in my drafts for the past couple of months and haven’t really managed to get time to write it. Well, there’s no time like the present.

A few months ago, I completed and launched a couple of exciting new viral widgets to complement the Desperados Beer Die Hards website launched earlier this year and to help drive website traffic.

The widgets were well received overall and gained a number of hits soon after the official launch date.

The first widget is a personal Desperados Beer desktop clock built on the Adobe air platform in Actionscript 3 to help you keep those important meetings with your favorite brand lager.

The second widget is a neat little online app which allows you to upload your favorite pictures and get them framed from a choice of personalised Desperados frames which can be used on all your social networking profiles such as Facebook, Twitter or wherever you like.

Go on, go get framed…

To check out the Die-Hards and for your chance of winning some great competition prices for you and your mates, visit http://www.desperadosbeer.co.uk/die-hards

To also stand a chance on winning some tickets to Relentless Boardmasters festival in Newquay from the 5th – 9th of August hosted by Desperados Beer UK visit the Desperados Beer website.

Recently completed, the development of the eagerley anticipated second phase to the Desperados Beer website. Desperados Beer is a French brand beer with a Mexican bite and is part of Heineken International (Europe) group.

The Die-Hards section of the site was developed to build upon the main site which was officially launched in January 2009 to further promote the Desperados brand and to drive brand awareness in the UK. The Die-Hards is an interactive social networking platform allowing fans of the beer to register and share videos and pictures of their favourite or most interesting Desperados moments.

The website offers regular competitions updated frequently featuring a range of prices from cases of Desperados Beer to weekend getaways to exciting destinations for you and your mates. The site also offers a custom Desperados frame generator (allowing users to frame their beloved pics with a range of Desperados frames to share on social networking sites such as Facebook), a range of wallpapers to trully give your computer that Desperados Beer flavour, oath facility allowing you to swear your allegiance to the Desperados brand by video or image upload and a cool desktop widget allowing you to set an alarm for that special moment you’ve set aside to get better aquainted with your ice cold pint of Desperados Beer.

To check out the Die-Hards and for your chance of winning some great competition prices for you and your mates, visit http://www.desperadosbeer.co.uk/die-hards 

Meet you on the other side Amigo…

I use the Recent Comment widget on the sidebar to display recent comments on my posts in the form of “{authorLink} On {postLink}”. I noticed that the author link (links to website of whoever posted a comment on one of my posts) didn’t seem to work in all browsers accept Google Chrome (strangely enough).

On further investigation into the source of the page, I realised that for some reason the link generated was urlEncoded and not formated right.

e.g

‘http://www.example.com%27%20rel%3D%27external%20nofollow’

instead of

“http://www.example.com” rel=”external nofollow”

After a few minutes of debugging and digging around through the wordpress pages. I eventually found the source of the problem located on line 148 in category-template.php in the wp-includes folder.

$return = “<a href=’$url’ rel=’external nofollow’ class=’url’>$author</a>”;

I simply changed the line above to

$return = “<a href=\”$url\” rel=\”external nofollow\” class=\”url\”>$author</a>”;

and that sorted out the format of the output string and PRESTO the links work again.

* UPDATE – 9th February 2009

Just a heads up on this post.

Some WP users have reported that they’ve found the line in question in “comment-template.php” and not in “category-template.php”. So if you cant find it in one of them, it’s most likely in the other.

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.

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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]

Canon Toshiba Copiers – Cut Price Copiers

Complete website design and development, flash advertising banner creation, corporate branding for Cut Price Copiers. Canon-Toshiba-Copiers is a subsidiary of SOS Systems based in Crawley, West Sussex who are registered resellers of Canon and Toshiba full colour photocopiers.

I was contracted by a Crawley based Creative Digital Agency to completely design and develop a website for Crawley based company SOS Systems that would help promote and drive online sales of their premium full color Canon and Toshiba color photocopiers through the help of targeted search engine optimised website pages developed to help head and drive organic search engine traffic.

Cut Price Copiers is the online e-commerce trading name for SOS Systems Limited based in Crawley West Sussex trading on the URL www.canon-toshiba-copiers.co.uk . SOS Systems were founded in 1985 and have approved dealerships with Canon, Toshiba, Infotec and KIP, gaining an excellent reputation for prompt and efficient service at very competitive prices.

As the website was a new website that was being setup, I had complete control and free reign on the look and feel of the website and had to plan, visualise and produce a new marketing brand for SOS Systems / Canon Toshiba Copiers that would be aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate and developed and written in a search engine friendly way to help drive organic search engine traffic by allowing for relevant content to be served to the user first and also basing the website layout and links to allow for search engine friendly URL’s containing relevant and targeted keywords rather than dynamically generated URL’s which search engine bots tend to struggle with.

I visualised, designed and developed a corporate brand logo to be used with the website that would compliment the site and give the website and arm (Cut Price Copiers) of SOS Systems brand recognition in it’s own right. This logo is based on the name of the website (Cut Price Copiers) and bears an abstract resemblence to the acronym of the name (CPC).

As the website is mainly to promote and drive sales of Canon and Toshiba brand color copiers. I designed the website and logo to use the the same color scheme as their suppliers Canon and Toshiba, allowing the end user to easily connect with and allow recognition of the products being promoted.

I also created various flash and static advertising banners with custom animations to give the website visual appeal and to allow the customer to be able to interact with the website easily and more efficiently.

Art Direction
Website Design & Development
Corporate Branding & Identity
Interactive Design & Development
Graphic Design
Flash Animation

A complete case study of this project will soon be available at http://www.chelleyjonesdesigns.co.uk

I will update this post when it does become available so please sign up to my feed to get the latest updates.
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Desperados Beer – A Taste Of Liberty

Lead flash and actionscript development to drive sales in the UK for Desperados Beer. Desperados Beer is a globally recognised tequila flavoured beer sold in over 50 countries worldwide and distributed by Tiger Beer UK Ltd.

Working with lead London based Creative Agencies Hero Digital, and Agency Space (who provided all the creatives). I was contracted as the lead developer to help drive the UK online marketing assault for the french owned beer brand Desperados Beer through the development of interactive flash micro-sites targeting 18 to 34 year old beer drinkers. The website features competition forms for exquisite getaways to lucky Desperados Beer drinkers, photo galleries of Desperados Beer venues and promotional nights and a host of other cool features available and some yet to come. To stay posted and for more information on the Desperados Beer brand, visit their UK site online hombre!.

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It’s 5:22am and am wondering what I’m still doing up and why I can’t get a wink of sleep.

Seeing as I’ve got a new app on my iPhone which connects onto my work blog, I thought I’ld give it a whirl and submit my post while in bed.

Determined to set strides and show the competition how it’s really done, the creative digital agency I work for {Evolutions} has evolved and has gone mobile with the launch of the mobile site and the iPhone specific website with all the bells and whistles courtesy of their newly found investment (me of course!).

Embracing the iPhone with the launch of the Apple iPhone 3g, and on a secret bid to weed the office of Sony Ericsons and Blackberry’s {you know yourSalvs}, I was set a task of developing a super lite pocket friendly iPhone specific website which would deliver a few selected video portfolio pieces to be shown to prospective clients and friends browsing the site on the Apple iPhone.

Working closely with our Creative Director {www.creatific.com – who I may add is absolutely anal about pixel perfection.} I developed the Evolutions iPhone web site featuring the very best in video entertainment, google maps with directions/gps navigation(iPhone 3g), sliding menus, pixel perfect resolutions optimized for the iPhone and a hint of ooooh! lahh! lahhhhh!.

Sounds good doesn’t it? Well, it sure is. See it for yourself by visiting the evolutions {www.evolutions.co.uk} home page on your iPhone and let me know what you think.

Well, I’ll be off to bed now, night night, rather, morning morning.

Blogging from my iPhone.

;o)

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?