Retro media

Our friends over at Retro media have gone live with a new online service and classic movies shop, check it out at www.retro-media.co.uk

orchard.co.uk goes live

The first of our big sites to go live this week, Orchard.co.uk are the leaders in recruitment throughout the Manchester and Leeds area. Orchard have relaunched their site with a stunning new style.

This site has a 'tag' driven content system allowing the recruiters to add jobs, calander events and news articles allowing users to perform keyword searches to be on all the sites content. Narrowing down the perfect job has never been so easy.

visit www.orchard.co.uk

The Blind Factory goes live

The second of our big sites to go live in a week after Orchard had 'gone live' we saw the grand opening of our biggest ecommerce site yet, click on over to www.TheBlindFactory.co.uk to see our flagship online store.

"After several months in development we've actually gone live. Thanks to Brookfresh we're now trading online" - K Murphy: Company Director, The Blind Factory Ltd .

The Blind Factory offers a massive range of Window Blinds and Conservatory Roof blinds. After looking at the competition in the market we decided to build a totally unique shopping system, the content is managed by a bespoke system, we think this is going to be a winner.

visit www.TheBlindFactory.co.uk

Freelance work - Abito

Heres a site I built for my freelance client ripe. I coded some lovely css for the html bit and ive created a couple of the flash elements found at the top of each page. (the one on locations is mine)

Although I built most of the site, some of the flash elements were done by another freelancer, shame that. I think it might have looked better if I'd done it ;)

check it out at www.abito.co.uk

Unused illustrations

Here's a couple of illustrations I did for a client, the project was cancelled so these went unused.

Shame.

Quickie site goes live

Lanonna.co.uk has gone live, designed by Lee H and built by me in a day.

its a mad mad mad mad year

This year has been the maddest year yet. It started with a splutter, seeing me walking around a business estate knocking on doors and waving my card in everyone's face and now see's me never leaving the office as im far too busy.

I have managed to keep all my clients happy enough that they have all returned with more work. Ive even seen a few faces from my past. a couple of ex-bosses (who's bridges I thought well and truly burned) have contacted me with work. Nice work too, Ive updated a site for Disney for one, and built a lovely flash product slider for another. Check out the Jasper Morrison site, im quit pleased with the slider I wrote completely from scratch.

Last month I worked on a project for Amaze in Runcorn that got my juices flowing. A new flash site for a Playstation 3 game from Evolution studios. A month of hardcore coding has produced this site. The guys I worked with were amazing and I learned a lot about structuring my actionscript classes. (seems the site isnt live at this time) It sthe first time Ive actually worked with a flash team on a purely development project.

Website generator has taken off this year with a new site at www.themealmakers.co.uk
Ive written a bespoke ordering system for it and it shows off how versatile the website-generator system is.

Basically ive created a shopping cart that will plug-into the website generator system, ive built it in such a way that its easy to alter to suit any future sites.

Ive also been involved with the re-design and build of the new look for www.lightart.co.uk, this should be going live soon. More news on this project later once it goes live.

Ive been busy creating a few banners for an agency who will remain nameless at the moment. (nothing cloak and dagger I just dont want to offer a list of clients thats all)

And Im currently working on a project for yet another new client that involves a fantastic CDROM, screenshots and production notes to follow.

Ive decided to send my clients VOIP phones this year for Christmas, ill also add a tin of quality streets too. Ive been using a skype phone for the past 2 weeks and have spent roughly £3.00 on calls so far, so considering my monthly phone bills have been in excess of £170.00 I think spending money on VOIP phones for my clients it will pay off in the end. Ive produced a couple of Brookfresh stickers and the phones are now fully logo'd up.

Scorching July

July has proved to be my busiest month yet, and I thought this was my quiet period. So I spent the first two weeks in Menorca. Sun, sand and running after Bailey. What I didn't expect was the amount of work waiting for me on my return.

The leaflet designed for the client I won through the tendering, turned into an email, and this has since turned into a web page for 'The Carshop'.

Sportlived have also had a facelift to their site, and they have added a few more sports, the site is really growing now, so much so they are advertising for staff.

Here's the new look, the left panel is a flash element based on the press ads and posters. The flash loads in the images and displays them as a slideshow:

While looking for a company called Dubit last month I accidently wandered into the offices of an advertising agency, they were very polite and ushered me out of the door, but not before they accepted a business card. A week later they invited me back to talk about the possibility of doing some work. Last week I produced several banner designs. So the moral is don't be shy and hand your card out to everyone you meet.

Ive also given the main Brookfresh site a bit of a facelift, well more of a botox injection to the eyebrows. Ive added a smart client area log-in, allowing my clients to download and upload documents and images. It's based on the php I wrote last month.

The Perfect Smile clinic have also had a facelift, or should that be a polish and scrape? Ive added a few new sections to the site and generally beefed it up.

In other news I'm freelancing at Pilot (yeah the same Pilot that made me redundant) in-house which makes a nice change as I usually dont freelance, especially not in-house. But they are a cool bunch of guys and it's nice stuff to work on. more later..

Just so I dont think things are going too well for me Slate Direct have done a runner. I thought I would pop in while I was passing their showroom, only to find the place shuttered up and a 'to-let' notice posted outside. They still owe me a small sum of money, but there's bugger all I can do about that as I have no-idea where it is they have scuttled off to. Ill keep the site up for a while until I decide what to do about it.

Anyway, Im fully booked for the whole of August so I cant spend all day typing this, bye for now.

Busy Month

Overall its been a busy month, Ive won a new client through a new tender document Ive created. And Ive also done several small sites still waiting to go live.

I still havent heard anything from the company retrieving the data from my burnt out drive.

Ive been playing around with php and ive created a small system to allow my clients to upload files to their folders on my site and the php also returns a list of files within that folder automatically. Not bad for my first attempt at php really, you can see the system in action here
it's pretty handy as I dont have to open a html page and add a file link, i just upload the file to the right folder.

Ive also written a flash version of the uploader to be integrated into the website-generator when I have time, you can see the flash version here the php for the flash is slightly different in that it ruturns the list of files in the folder as xml, so flash can recreate the list in a list component.

Hip Hotels goes live

For the whole of May I have worked on a huge site for one of my clients. Its one of the biggest projects Ive been involved with to date and it makes a change to work on a site that grants the user a bit of intellegence You wont find any annoying "click here" prompts and there are no lists of hotels or maps to be found anywhere. You simply make choices based on the images displayed. Every mouse click changes a selection of high quality images presented to you. Again images are used to help the user make a decision, and a small amount of text teases the user, offering small snippets of history and interesting anecdotes.

The whole site was constructed around a single class, the class itself is a pretty complicated piece of code. It takes xml from the database and presents the menu, each click presents a new menu, again taken from the xml.

There's also a bespoke mp3 player built into the site, and this should appear at a later date, The music on the site is absolutely fantasctic, well worth buying.

Dooomed i tell you.

last Friday as I was in the process of backing up my Work in progress (WIP) hard drive, the bloody thing died on me. It holds all my work files for the last year. It wouldn't reboot and just contined to make a horrible 'wrr click' death rattle. The irony is that I had just deleted the backup file of WIP to make space for the uncompressed files on my main drive.
The drive is at the repair shop now, lets all keep our fingers crossed.

Update: The drive is dead according to the so called 'expert' I gave it to. Im'm now going to try and find a duplicate of the drive and use the parts to fix this one.