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Merry Christmas from Pixelwave Web Design

As a family, we’re not sending Christmas cards this year.  Instead we have donated the money we would normally spend on cards and postage to the charity DebRA (http://www.debra.org.uk/).  This is in memory of 14 year old Angharad, daughter of friends of ours, who passed away earlier this year having lived with the condition Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) since she was born.

I have decided to extend this to my business clients as well. Not only does it allow me to support a worthwhile charity, but it saves paper, trees, the posties back and gives you one less thing to throw away after Christmas.

So, please accept this email as a opportunity for me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

With Best Wishes,Alan.

And to make it feel a little more Festive, here’s a snowy scene from our garden last year.

Merry Xmas from Pixelwave Web Design

Hot on the heels of building a new website for the INTR Triathlon Club, I’ve now been asked to design them a poster for their inaugural Aberystwyth Sprint Triathlon next year.

Triathlon Poster

Pixelwave Web Design is pleased to announce the release of a brand new website for the INTRtri Triathlon Club.

As a member of the INTRtri Club I was building this site as part of a sponsorship deal. It was also a personal project as the previous website annoyed me whenever I visited it  it because it simply didn’t work on most browsers and I was therefore unable to see what was going on with the club. The new site has a more attractive look and feel, whilst still retaining the clubs identity through the use of it’s colour scheme.

The site is built around a Content Management System so that club officials will be able to update the site whenever they wish without needing to know anything about website design. This is of course essential for such a site as one of it’s main purposes is to inform members and potential members of upcoming activities and training sessions, and to promote club events such as races.

In addition to the CMS that allows quick and easy changes to be made to the content, there is a weblog style latest news feature for news updates and an events calendar allowing people to see at a glance what training sessions are available each week. Members can even subscribe to the calendar via Google Calendars if they wish.

There is also a forum, which is likely to become the hub of the website, allowing members to keep in contact and arrange to train and race with each other. I for one am glad of the updates to the site and hope that the other members like it too. So far feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

INTRtri website design

For those who don’t know, I’ve become a bit of a triathlete this year, so alongside my web design work I’ve been out swimming, cycling and running at every opportunity and competing in various events. I’ve actually been quite competitive in the events I’ve entered too, picking up the odd trophy here and there.

I joined the local Triathlon Club who had a website that had been hurriedly cobbled together by a volunteer who isn’t a professional website designer. There were a few issues with it that grated whenever I visited it and a few other people had commented on it too, so at the last club meeting the inevitable happened and I just had to volunteer my services to build them a new, all-singing, all-dancing website that works and will be an asset to the club.

Of course, being a club run by volunteers they couldn’t pay full price for a website and I wouldn’t feel right charging a club that I’m part of anyway. However, rather than do it for free, Pixelwave Web Design is becoming a sponsor of the club. I’ll have my logo on their site and hopefully on club race kit too and, once their finances are all in place I’ll will be getting paid a little bit for it too. I’m not sure if any business will come my way from this sponsorship yet and no doubt what business does come my way will be from members of the club who will also want me to work at discount prices, but it’ll feel good to see my business name out there in the community.

I really should limit my interests though as I’ve already built and run websites for the local Mountain Biking Group, local Geocachers, the local windsurfers, kitesurfers and surfers and have helped set up various web-related things for the local moth recorders. I produce the Aberystwyth Beekeepers Association newsletters and will no doubt end up working on a website for them sometime in the future too. I really do need to get some proper paid work to go alongside all of these those as things are a little quiet at the moment.

Pixelwave Website Design has recently finished work on a brand new website for the The Association for Human Pharmacology in the Pharmaceutical Industry (AHPPI).

Website Design for AHPPI

Their new website is intended as a promotional tool for the AHPPI and a information point for members of the Association. In addition to providing information on the AHPPI and its activities, the website will allow members access to information relating to meetings and conferences and the ability to share documentation. The intention of the website is to provide information and stimulate interest in the AHPPI and to encourage new membership.

Pixelwave Web Design has been involved on every level of the design of this website, from the initial concept through organising the content through to the design and construction. The website has a simple organisation to facilitate ease of use and navigation and has been built around a web-based content management system allowing the clients to update and add to the website on a regular basis.

It is important to develop a clear, understandable information architecture that will be intuitive for visitors to the site and site administrators alike. This not only makes the website easy to navigate and allows visitors to easily find the content they require, but it also aids maintenance and helps give a clear understanding of the sites objectives. Pixelwave Web Design discussed such issues with the clients to help them develop a suitable information architecture for the website.

The overall look and feel of the website is professional, clean and ‘business-like’. Design elements have been kept to a minimum and the text is easy to read and accessible.

The site how now been live for a few weeks and despite being self-confessed techno-phobes the administrators have been adding and editing content without any problems. The site has been well received by both visitors to the sites and AHPPI members.

New projects are a little thin on the ground at the moment – Feel free to hire me! I have been working though and have been busy this week working on a re-structuring and lots of content updates on the Celtic Spirit Journeys website.  I’ve also started work on a brand new site for Inside Edge Training.

Celtic Spirit Journeys is a website that I revamped completely a couple of years ago and has been undergoing a bit of an overhaul due to a changing emphasis on the types of journeys and retreats they are offering.

Inside Edge Training offering 1:1 coaching and management training for professionals and as yet don’t have a website. I have started work on it though and hope to have it finished and ready to go anytime soon. It is a simple brochure style site outlining what they do, what they can help you to achieve and why you should choose Inside Edge.

It’s nice to work on these relatively straight forward brochure style sites as it means that there is plenty of time to really pay attention to the details as far as the look of the site is concerned. Rather than troubling myself with the intricacies of scripting and database management I can just get on, build the individual pages and tailor each one around the content. Small sites like this may not be the most lucrative as far as a web developer is concerned but they do allow me to concentrate on the design, which is why I got into this game in the first place.

I’m liking the look so far and might even create some business cards and letter headers for them as a freebie too.

Pixelwave Web Design has recently finished work on a brochure style website for a local luxury holiday accommodation provider in Wales.

Bay Cliff and the Lodge are quality, comfortable self-catering holiday lets in Borth, Wales. Run by the third generation of a family of holiday accommodation providers in the area.

Website Design for Holiday Accommodation

I built a website for these clients to showcase their other holiday accommodation in the area a few years ago and have since been maintaining this site for them and working on other design projects such as desktop publishing for them since. Earlier this year their daughter started renovating these new properties and approached me to build the website for them.

The new wesbite is a brochure style site that promotes the properties and their location. The website reflects the high standard of the properties and the modern decor so has a very bright, airy modern feel to it. I’m pleased with the overall look of the site and so are my clients.

It’s always good to see people recommend my services and I wish my clients all the best with their new venture.

Pixelwave Web Design has just completed work on a re-design of a website for Exam Tuition.

Exam Tuition are a group of professional teachers and tutors providing tailor-made home study courses in the GCSE core subjects. They approached me in May asking if I could re-build their website to make it look more professional and add the ability for customers to register and pay online using PayPal.

After some initial discussion I set to work on this project, rebuilding their site from scratch with a new look and feel. I also made a few suggestions along the way that would aid usability and enhance the visitors experience of the site. In addition I suggested a few changes to the information architecture that would improve search engine rankings and make the site easier to navigate.

It wasn’t long before the site was ready for the public and it went live last week. Best of all, they’ve paid me already and they seem happy with the site having said:

The look of the site is excellent & much better than our competitors!

I can’t ask for more than that on little projects like this.

Exam Tuition Website Redesign

Work is progressing well on the website I’m building for the Borth & Ynsylas Golf Club. I’m just waiting for the last few bits of content before it can go live. So here’s a sneak preview.

Golf course website design

Pixelwave Web Design has recently launched a brand new website for the Welsh Association of ME & CFS Support (WAMES).

WAMES Website

The new website is intended as an information point for people looking for information about ME in Wales. It is aimed at adults, children, patients, carers, friends, professionals and the media. Many of the target audience are ME sufferers and have vision and concentration problems so one of the primary concerns of the site was that it had to be easy to read with straight forward navigation and conform to various accessibility guidelines. These principles are always important in any website built by Pixelwave Web Design, but were fundamental to the site on this occasion.

In addition the site is bilingual and built around a Content Management System so that the charity administrators can update it free of charge whenever they wish. Creating an easy to use, bilingual website around a Content Management System did present its difficulties, but the end result was worth it.

The new website was launched earlier this month and has so far gained many positive responses from its users. The administrators have also been getting to grips with the use of the content management system and have been progressing well.