Ripped Off Britain

Built this site a while ago for someone who was annoyed by being ripped off on car parts in the UK compared to international prices. Its not really being used much at the moment, what is surprising is how well it does in search for a site that has very little content. Other sites with very similar titles/subjects but with a lot more content come up beneath it in google searches.

Ripped Off Britain

Technically its a quite plain vanilla wordpress site with a custom theme to differentiate it. We made up a dog logo illustration as well, to give the site some more character, doing pictures made a nice change from my normal ‘code view’.

Simple Blog for TLC Live

Note: 2014/06/30 This blog was replaced as part of a larger site rebuild in mid 2013.

TLC are online tutors based in the UK. We recently added a simple blog to their site to allow anyone in the company to add content to the site. They can use it to trumpet company announcements and extol the virtues of their learning platform.

TLC Live blog

We added a few plugins in that the client requested from an earlier system they had used. Other than that its pretty plain vanilla WordPress with some adaptions.

We wrote a custom excerpts function so we could finish the excerpt at the end of the first paragraph. The client also wanted the excerpts to keep their formatting and links which are often removed by default.

Also wrote a couple of widgets to emulate the behaviour of some links on their main site.

They also have a more useful than standard 404 page which lists recent articles if you mistype an address.

You can see the site at www.tlclive.com/blog.

Mock-up and Print Solutions

Put this small site together for Martin’s new company. He just wanted a small site to get started and provide a place for people to find out a little more about him.

He makes mockups for graphic designers and agencies also plates for Flexo and Letterpress printing.

We spent a good while going backwards and forwards so Martin could get it all how he wanted it to be. He seems very happy with what he has ended up with so I’m happy.

Mock-up and Print Solutions

The nature of what he does means that he doesn’t have a huge amount of printed material he can use without compromising someones copyright or confidentiality. So we made up some ‘type of’ illustrations to show the types of work he does and provide some visual interest.

From a technical point of view its quite simple just flexible stylesheets for different screen sizes besides the normal HTML5, CSS and Javascript.

Pelmets4u

Finally managed to get pelmets4u online this week. Its a different kind of shop selling customised pelmets. You can order pelmets to your own width, depth and height. In addition you can specify square ends or rounded ends in two different radiuses and different styles for the cutaway at the bottom. They offer several finishes and even the ability to get your pelmet covered in your own fabric.


screen shot of pelmets 4 u

As the site and the manufacturing is just starting off we have a 20% off your next order offer if you send us photos of the pelmets you order in your home, and we can use them on the site.

Its been a difficult site to build, not so much the technical side as the how to make it usable whilst maintaining the complexity of the rules. The ability to customise within the available. We’ve been through bunches of changes to try and make it simpler to use but in some ways it has got more complicated. Not sure if we’ve managed it or not. One of the major ones was setting up chooser boxes so you can select your dimensions in imperial units and get them converted to mm.

I guess time and the proportion of visitors that become orders will tell. I expect we will end up tweaking it a bit as we see where customers/visitors orders drop off in the process.

Nobody else seems to do anything similar so it will be interesting to see what the demand is. We are expecting it to be used by slightly older people but it might be we get a profile of clients we never imagined. It seems quite a lot of haberdashery and curtains is fashion so who knows what will be ‘the in thing’ next.

Its one of the things I like about my job is that I get to learn lots of odd bits of knowledge about my customers industries. I definitely have learned a lot about Pelmets, Curtains and Haberdashery in general.

You can see the site and order some pelmets at www.pelmets4u.co.uk/.

Swimming School Website

Just made Janes swim school website live. Its a small simple site built in WordPress for her swimming school in St.Albans, Hertfordshire. Hopefully it will help her business attract more learner swimmers. She wanted to stand out from other swimming schools and look professional yet friendly.

Jane started off with nothing so we worked out a structure together and what she wanted to feature and what parts of the site she wanted to change. Jane wanted to feature testimonials from her customers so I’ve added in the ability to add more testimonials as and when she gets them and the will appear scattered throughout the site. She can edit all the pages so it should keep her costs under control and let her phrase things as she wants. Its a starting point we will see how the site moves on in the future.

As well as print style sheets it has some pretty simple mobile styles so that it is moving towards responsive design in a small way.

It uses my sitemap plugin to create her sitemap.xml dynamically so it will be updated everytime a page is updated or new content is added.

Its also mildly minimized with my minify plugin it doesn’t go all the way and remove all the line breaks but it cleans up a lot of the white space so it should reduce the amount of data transferred when you request the page thereby making the pages load faster.

I’m monitoring for errors so we should sort out any issues that visitors bring up.