The Southampton Mela is a huge event, it’s estimated that over 25,000 joined Art Asia in Hoglands Park to celebrate the 8th Southampton Mela Festival.
Studio Republic were asked to produce a mini site that would help to show off and promote the Mela for the coming years. Art Asia would love it if you’ve attended to get involved, which is as easy as a click of a button or two. Follow their Twitter, make friends with them on Facebook or upload your images and videos of the day.
For our part it’s great to be working with a local charity on such a fun site. http://www.southamptonmela.com/ Check it out and make sure you visit it over the coming year to see how it grows.
Oh! and thanks Art Asia we had fun.
After we completed the branding work for International Pathfinder Solutions we immediately started on their website and here’s the result.
A clean crisp and to the point content managed (CMS) site. Need we say more.
http://www.internationalpathfindersolutions.com/
We’ve just launched another brand new site – welcome to the fantastic Inspiring Hampshire. The monthly lifestyle magazine for professionals.
Have a look new features will be going online each month so pop back as often as you can… and don’t forget to subscribe (you never know, you might win a iPad!)
http://www.inspiringhampshire.com/
May has been a busy month so far for the Studio Republic team. Another site has gone live and as a result we’ve got another happy customer. By all accounts they enjoyed the experience too! Here’s what they had to say…
“A big thank you from all of red octopus for making our website, brochures, B-cards and banner so beautifully brilliant! The new bits and bobs have made our company look very professional and we are more confident in selling ourselves in schools and at festivals!”
Red Octopus Movement and Visual Arts is a community arts organisation that uses sensory performing arts to stimulate, educate and excite young people. We redesigned their old site and gave their business cards and brochure a face lift as well.
Visit their brand spanking new site at: http://www.redoctopusarts.co.uk/
Thank you Red Octopus – we had fun!
Outdoor promotional banner
We’ve just completed the rebranding of the rather attractive Beautiful South Awards for Excellence 2010.
New for 2010, Tourism South East’s highly acclaimed Tourism Excellence Awards have been refreshed and updated to become the Beautiful South Awards for Excellence. Recognising the best tourism businesses large and small in a diverse range of 20 categories the Awards are now in their 20th year.
http://www.beautifulsouthawards.co.uk/
The site was launched with a eblast and a postcard to all Tourism South East members.
Launch Eblast
Launch Postcard
We always advise our clients to keep their website’s design fresh and their content up to date. Our own site isn’t generally the best example of this – we’re too busy working on other people’s designs to devote enough time to our own. This time, illustrator extraordinaire Dave Stephens brought the new concept to life with a set of illustrated characters.
Of course this means that we’ve had to put the Lego characters back in the toy box. We’ve had great fun with them (and they’re still dotted around the studio) but they’ve had a good run and now it’s time for a change. Working with Dave has been a pleasure as always and we’re already planning the next additions to the Studio Republic family – watch this space!
Meet the Studio Republic family
Speed is everything with the web. It’s not just about not losing users’ interest while your home page renders though. With Google expected to take page load time into account when ranking websites, it has never been more important to make sure your website loads as quickly as possible. With this in mind (and because we have a penchant for new tech!) we have invested in a new Linux web server from our trusted suppliers Dedipower.
For anyone who cares about the techie stuff, here is the spec:
Processor: Intel Xeon Quad Core 2.0GHz 64bit
Memory: 4GB RAM
Storage: 2 x 250GB SATA
RAID: RAID 1
And for anyone who cares more about how things look, here’s a picture of a server:
Nice, isn't it?!
The bottom line is that we can now deliver even faster, more reliable and more secure websites than ever before.
Sound good? Why not take a look at what our Winchester web design studio can offer you.
We recently took over the maintenance of VetHelpDirect.com and have really enjoyed getting stuck in to the slightly unglamourous back end development of the site. We’ve made some big changes to the functionality, but until now nothing that we could really shout about. That’s all changed today as the new look home page has just gone live. It’s a real step forward for the website’s design and heralds the other new functionality which is coming soon; the “small furries” and “farm animals” symptom advice guides.
It’s been a pleasure working with Vet Help Direct and by all accounts they’re pretty keen on us too:
“Studio Republic are a real breath of fresh air, their positive ‘can do’ attitude and quick completion times are exactly what we need for our vet advice website and find a vet directory. They are a real pleasure to work with.”
Susie Samuel
Vet Help Direct
Future web design and web development projects for Vet Help Direct include implementing a more flexible content management system to keep the site up to date.
Watch this space!
Us web designers have known it for a long time and now thankfully Google have confirmed it – Internet Explorer 6 is past it! If only Microsoft would also take the bull by the horns and kill it off it would make our lives so much easier.
When building a site, a huge amount of time can be taken up with re-engineering bits of the code to work in IE 6. It affects our productivity and ultimately costs our clients more money so anything that goes some way to ending the life of this pain in the web designer’s backside can only be a good thing!
Here’s the email sent out by Google last night:
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
Being very LA… err no err… well Hampshire, Agent Smart has “had some work done”.
Never fear he doesn’t now resemble a cross between Katie Price and a Sherlock Holmes, that really would be too scary to share here! The new improved website design has gone live now and as facelifts go, it has been rather successful.
Check out the all new improved homepage at: www.agentsmart.co.uk and while you’re there don’t forget to have a go at the 12 days of Christmas quiz for your chance to win some of the finest Hampshire wine available.
