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…

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.

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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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Useful World is an online ecommerce site based on the magento platform which specialises in electric and useful home products. I was approached by the client for help with rebranding their company image, re-designing their website to give a fresher more unique look.

My role was to visualize and create a logo for the company which would be used as their brand name on stationery, online sales and banners, design a colourful website to compliment their logo. I provided the client with psd files of the design which they intergrate onto their existing website based on the magento platform.

view project » [offline]

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)

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?