Portfolio
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
The Orbit research website came about because of one of John’s past lives as a Project Manager for a medical imaging company. Orbit were part of the team that were responsible for getting medical images from the mobile MRI and CT trucks around Birmingham via satellite to Budapest and then back to Birmingham and Cardiff. Orbit provided the mobile satellite equipment and the satellite infrastructure. John did stuff like crawl around on the back of unfinished MRI trucks with network cables and set up 12 servers in a week as well train Radiologists in Budapest and Birmingham.
Anyway. Orbit wanted a new website and were referred to Godjira from John’s old employer Pukka-j. Gavin at Orbit wanted more than just a website that sat there and was interested in the marketing methodology that goes with a news driven site.
We have provided Orbit with a WordPress driven site that lets them edit and add as much content as they want. We also split their main product offerings down to three target areas presented on the front splash screen with a bit of funky JavaScript driven image swapping.
Being WordPress, the site is Google focussed and does clever stuff like feed an RSS feed out to populate a Facebook fanpage. We also included the LiveZilla live support software, so now if you want to know anything about Satellite Internet solutions, you can chat live with a genuine bona fide expert in Gavin Foster. We also set up a mailing list based on the RSS feed using FeedBurner.
We really liked working with Orbit. Gavin has some great expressions for common computer issues. Such as user error being “Finger Trouble” and VOIP phones being “scramblers”. We hope to continue the relationship and look forward to helping Orbit with their online marketing for years to come.
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Go-go Wear is a shop website for a range of sexy shoes and boots.
We were asked to make it clean clear and simple to use with a focus on the products themselves. We were also asked to come up with a logo and branding.
We decided to use ZenCart, the free Open Source shopping cart software. Zen Cart is fully featured and has lots of available add-ons. Plus it’s free, which is the best price!
We came up with a logo design and site design that we felt reflected the nature of the shoes. Quite often these shoes are sold with a range of other products like lingerie and we wanted a look and feel that separated us from that market, hence the groovy chick in a seventies stylee.
We also wanted to promote the site using a blog, rather than throw it all in together and risk losing the clean nature of the shop site, we added a separate WordPress based blog at blog.gogowear.co.uk and then linked to two together by putting RSS feeds from each site on to the other. (Something you have to use a third party feed manager for, in this case we used Feedburner).
We also set up a Facebook Fan Page at facebook.com/gogowear and a Twitter feed at twitter.com/gogowear and populated both with the RSS feed.
We really like this one. It’s simple, elegant and yet technically very clever with lots of integration going on behind the scenes. The shoes also rock !
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
One way to find out how many sites Godjira have done over the last few years is to run a search through Google of “website by Godjira” the tag line we like to attach to most of our sites.
Take a look here and see what you can find. We will carry on updating the portfolio page so you can find out more about all our great customers.
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
Not a new site, but one of my personal favourites.
Dean Perry from Perry Landscape services was a member of my BNI Chapter and asked us to do him a website. We had a chat about what he wanted from a website and he was looking for an extended brochure just to be a point of presence. He did have quite a lot of nice photos though and wanted to get these on to his site for people to see his work.
Having a look through the photos, it seemed that there were enough there to write a little case study about each type of job. So we put the pictures together and Dean wrote a little piece about each one following the easy case study formula: STAR. That’s Situation, Task, Action, Result.
Writing case studies describes what you do in a way that is much easier to read than trying to list everything you can do. It also works really well with search engines as the keywords fall naturally in to place. So Dean writing about a garden in Trowbridge hits the keywords without having to force them in.
This being Godjira, we went to town on the clever stuff. There is a cute glow background, SiFR image replacement on the titles and a Mootools lightbox effect on the pictures. Click them and they get bigger. It’s clean and simple with the right sort of colours and a modern look that won’t date quickly.
Dean is delighted with the results. As a tradesman, he stands out from the others by having a professional website. He says the site paid for itself with the very first order he got through it.
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Cameron Stewart from Team PM bumped in to John while he was queueing for coffee at one of the Wiltshire Business club events. Cameron was setting up a new company offering PRINCE2 project management training and consultancy and needed help with his website.
He wanted a website that was professional and clean looking yet also worked really well. Every website needs to have an objective or a reason to exist. In this case it was to allow customers to see when the next courses were available and to make it easy and obvious to book a place.
Looking at the way the courses and venues and dates were arranged, it was obvious to us that the best way to do this would be to build the site with a little bit of a database to manage the data. So we created a database using MySQL and PureEdit as a management tool. Linking relational data allows you to create lots of pages for each course dynamically, by pulling the page content out of the database based on simple parameters, like all courses for venue 1 or all the courses in January for instance.
The latest courses scroll across the front page and it’s one click to select the latest courses to get to the booking form.
We think the design is sleek and modern looking without being too way out, which would make you look out of step with the competition. We used some nice crisp graphics to create a consistent theme and have set the site up so it can be easily expanded as more courses come on-line and Team PM tell us more about what they do. We have even given Team PM the ability to edit their own pages using PureEdit
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
We thought it would be best to start off our portfolio pages with the latest site we have been working on and that’s our own!
The old Godjira site was starting to look a bit tired, it was bold and bright and easy to use, but needed updating to use more of the screen real estate. We also wanted to be able to use it to feed our Social Media pages like Facebook and Twitter.
First we came up with a new logo. The G in Godjira is two G’s joined together and is also meant to look like an @ sign. We matched this all up with a font that would let us join the G’s together.
We definitely knew we wanted to use WordPress as the engine to drive the site. WordPress is great. It may have started off as a blogging platform, but it’s got so much built in functionality it’s ideal for sites where you want to put lots of new content on especially if you want to drive your Social Media pages from it. Straight out of the box, it already lets you write news articles and generate RSS feeds. With a little tweaking, you can be feeding Facebook, Twitter and lots more.
Over the last couple of years our “proposition” has kind of evolved in to three things: New Sites, Work on existing sites and Interesting Things. We wanted to make sure the new site reflected that so split the main content up in to exactly those three categories.
Traditionally, web companies have used stock imagery of office blocks, satellites and other abstract business concepts. Those are boring, hackneyed and tame. We like kittens and monkeys and baby pandas. I’m pretty sure most people prefer those to yet another picture of a satellite dish or a smirking girl in a headset.
The most important pages in the new site will be the portfolio pages. We are going to write a little case study for each one, very much like this and talk about what the customer wanted, what we did and what the result was. We will try to get a fair few up before Xmas. The new site has only been going for a couple of days, but the statistics seem to back up what we were already thinking. That these days the things people are looking for on websites are “interesting things”. In most cases, that’s stories and people. So we are going to give you what you want. Stories and People.
The site does some clever things too. We’ve linked our RSS feed in to Facebook, so our Facebook page gets the latest stories. We’ve linked it in to Twitter too and daisy chained all of them together so we can write something once and send it out to all sorts of different media at the same time. We did think about using Ping.FM to join everything up, but there the danger is that you will be just broadcasting and not actually interacting with your fans and followers. It’s supposed to be *social* media. Let’s all be sociable!
We also signed up to MailChimp at the same time. We’ve been working with MailChimp for customers for a while now and it was just a matter of time before we got round to using it ourselves. It’s an excellent mailing list manager, with a super friendly admin interface that links in to things like Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics and Contacts effortlessly.
Another super cool feature is the LiveZilla live chat client. This lets you chat in real time to someone using the site. It also gathers live statistics. It’s really funny watching exactly how people are browsing your site, but it has definitely reinforced our opinions on Interesting Things.
Every website should have one of those “Under Construction” banners on them. Like painting the Forth Bridge, websites are *never* finished. This one is no exception. We are going to tell you all about the sites we have done and are working on and lots of exciting new projects we have coming up like our £150 Tradesman’s package and our blogging deal.
Friday, December 18th, 2009
Every website design agency has a portfolio page. We want to make ours a little different by telling you a little story about each customer in terms of what we are asked to do, what we actually did and how we added value and over-performed for each customer.
Of course we are going to include some screenshots, but it’s people and stories that are interesting so we want to tell you about those.
Watch this space as we add more and more of our customer portfolio.
