Rosie and Lee Web Design

The Photography Parlour has gone from strength to strength since its launch earlier this month. On its first day it had well over 700 unique visitors and has enjoyed a large daily unique visitor count since. As an excellent resource for up and coming photographers in all fields, with reviews on products, tutorials and advice in business know how and bucket loads of interviews from world class photographers it's the one stop shop for photographers world wide.

The FORUM - Designed for Photographers

The forum is the latest addition to The Photography Parlour, and we are proud to have been involved in the concept and design process. With two phases of user testing and excellent feed back from photographers alike, the forum is a great resource designed for photographers, by photographers. Being bespoke in nature, the design was based on The Photography Parlour's current layout and structure, which was quite challenging as each page in the forum needed to be custom designed and pixel perfect. Overcoming these obstacles, and with a few late nights, the Forum design migrates well into The Photography Parlour's current branding seamlessly.

Navigation and Ease of Use

Navigating the forum could not be easier - from the first page all forums and topics are highlighted and the titles of each stand out from the rest of the text on the page. Drilling down to the exact content you need can be done via navigating the various links, clicking through from the forum, to the topic and then scrolling to see posts. Alternatively there is a search option for members to target results based on a few keywords.

Replying and Creating New Topics

Once your desired topic and set of posts has been found, it's really easy to post a response to the forum. Making use of the new open source CKEditor, replies can consist of images (really important for photographers), smilies and links, as well as the basic formatting available in a word processor.

Manage Your Profile

If you decide to register with the Forum, you get the option to customise your profile. From uploading a picture to filling in details of your social media links, you can edit and customise how you will appear to other photographers in the topics and posts you make. There is also the option to bookmark posts and topics for quick access via your profile control panel. You can also choose to subscribe to a post, which will update you by email when a post is updated - great if you're on the move and need instant access to an urgent question that can be answered by seasoned professionals! With the future being full of potential for growth, we're keeping an eye on The Photography Parlour, and we even have a few more plugins to the site that we're developing that are going to be great additions!

Witney Builders and Trades was launched Late March/Early April 2010 with style! Picture hundreds of people dressed in cycling gear, all lining up for a mammoth ride and all in the name of Charity. On the backs of some cyclists cycle tops is displayed a website - witneybuildersandtrades.com.

With around 100 people at the dinner party later, the web launch was a great success and its popularity continues to grow. Paul Granger, the owner, runs his own building company Paul Granger Artisan Builders, which shouts of Paul's artistic flair and design perfectionism through the quality of his building work.

A Directory of Artistic Builders and Tradesmen

Frustrated with the various directories out there that follow the look and feel of the old style telephone book, Witney Builders and Trades takes a different approach to being an online directory for builders and tradesmen. As a result you'll notice that the website is littered with large pictures displaying the work done by each service. The whole website has a different feel to it. Opening the home page you're immediately put into the deep end. No long lists of text or search boxes and endless grids of different categories of service. No. From the word go you are presented with large images displayed as a rolling slide show of the work done by all services listed on the website. Immediately you get a feel for the quality of work produced by the people listed on the site!

An Online Directory With An Arty Feel

Witney Builders and Trades is more than just a website displaying the work of one builder. It's a website that is a directory of builders and tradesmen in Witney, Oxfordshire and the surrounding areas aimed at showing off top quality work all on one site. This is the one stop resource for you to find exactly what you are looking for - and see some examples of the work the tradesmen have already done.

The Boutique London Style

The website has been designed from our Boutique Web Design Range - in particular making use of the London template. The London template compliments the style desired by Artisan Building Services and those supporting and listed on the website, shouting about the quality of work yet, being a clean design in nature. The website also speaks of simplicity and asthetic quality. Exactly what you'll get when dealing with the tradesmen listed on Witney Builders and Trades.

Twitter is a great tool for socialising, keeping up to date with friends and just general chin-wagging for the masses. With the introduction of Twitter it's become easy for me to find out in less than 30 words what everyone is up to at the click of a button, and all on one screen!

Whether you're a regular Tweeter or have been chirping less frequently than the rest of the social butterflies out there, you may have felt bombarded with the various platforms available to Tweet from. First off I heard of Hootsuite which was amazing - I could schedule my Tweets, see my followers' Tweets, my inbox, sent messages and mentions all on one screen! Then I could even track how many people were clicking on my Tweets and get a feel for what sort of things the masses were interested in and make my Tweets relevant! Then I heard about Twit Pic and how pictures could be uploaded and posted on Twitter with the click of a button! Then things got a lot better when I downloaded Tweet Deck to my iPhone! All of a sudden I could Tweet while on the move - Fantastic! The next stage for me was to create a Tweet center for a client, which gave me an awesome insight into how Twitter works and the enormous effort the guys at twitter put into making such a great site! But as the Twitter community has grown from a handful of users to millions, the Twitter team are putting their creative energy into enhancing what the original twitter site offers to us!

Latest Twitter News

Twitter's Biz Stone released a news article this month which details a conference with the Twitter team, which all are invited to, both in physical presence if you can afford the air fare/ travel and time, or in virtual presence via video feed over the internet. There are rumours that the Twitter team may be enhancing the site in several ways.

Twitter Gaming

Some sources report that Twitter may be integrating gaming into the social aspect of their site - how this will play out will be very exiting! Imagine being able to play some fun online games through twitter and tweet about the game's progress! Facebook tried to integrate this into their site with the various groups you could join and the actions you could take against others in the group, but the Twitter option has greater potential. Imagine just gaining a victory over a rival, and the battle has been broadcast all over twitter - you can then share the fun and laughter with everyone else in your tweet community. Or while playing games to pass the time, you can get a feed of the latest twitter goss while racking up high scores on your favourite shoot-em up!

Twitter SEO enhancements - Geo Tagging

One exciting aspect for SEO gurus will be the definate enhancement of geo-tagging your tweets, as mentioned in the latest newsletter from Biz Stone. This will mean that messages can be tagged with a location - which will also be picked up in google's news feeds in search results. A fascinating wealth of opportunites for breaking news - making it easier for us to get local information from sources that matter as they happen! Twitter is definately getting bigger - and if you're reading this and haven't yet joined up, you may be missing the next big thing in the online community!

For those you of you are familiar with Google's version of Twitter: Google Buzz, you may have got a little cheesed off with a huge screen of to and fro chat responses. More than this, the old system would collapse old comments, almost it would seem, at random, while new comments and posts weren't. This inconstancy could be a little confusing and tiring to use!

What is Google Buzz?

For People who don't know about Google Buzz, it's basically a social media interface built into google which makes it really easy for you to chat to your friends and contacts, and record the history of the conversation. However, one problem with the system has been that a chat history for one contact could span over a whole page, making it laborious to trace any conversation with several contacts.

Improvements

After feedback, Google has changed the way the conversations are now displayed on screen, making it easier to see all the conversations that you have been having, the comments on them and new posts. Google Buzz now is now packing the following:

• If there are 3 or more previous or new comments, we collapse them into a group.
• We leave the latest previous comment (from before your last visit) expanded to give you context.

• We leave the last two new comments (since your last visit) expanded so you can get a taste of the ongoing conversation and decide if you’re interested.

• If there are enough previous and new comments, we collapse them together into a single line to save space.

• You'll see the names of some of the people whose comments are collapsed, which can help you decide if you might be interested in diving into the conversation.

Thumbs up to Google for these changes that will definitely make a difference to all those users of Google Buzz out there!

We are out of the office this Easter

Hello! We will be out of the office this Easter until the 6th April. We will be picking up emails and replying to important messages so please don't feel that you can't contact us until then! We will be posted news of new websites we've worked on after the Easter break to keep you up to date with what we've been doing during the Easter run-up! Have a great Easter holiday, and we really hope the weather gets better! Rosie and Lee