Boutique Hotels in Cuba is a website for two luxury hotels in Havana, Cuba. This was a complex design that incorporates a booking system that allows for each different room within the two hotels to be booked separately.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, jQuery, WordPress, Cufon Fonts
Work completed: February 2015

www.boutiquehotelsincuba.com

Senzala is a Brazilian creperie based in Brixton Village, London. On the face of it this is a relatively simple site. However, custom post types are used for the Menu pages, which adds a lot of complexity. Additionally the exact design has resulted in the site needing two different designs, for desktop computers and mobile devices.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, jQuery, WordPress, Cufon Fonts
Work completed: April 2014

www.senzalacreperie.co.uk

Mulatu Astatke is an Ethiopian musician. This was a very simple one-page site that I built. As there was a very small budget for this project the idea was to design a very simple site. I believe this was achieved. We used simple widgets from Twitter, Facebook and Bands In Town to add dynamic content that would not need to be updated directly.

Technologies used: XHTML, CSS, Twitter Embed, Facebook Embed, Bands In Town Embed
Work completed: August 2013

www.mulatu-astatke.com

2 For The Road Events is an events production and promotion company based in London. This site was one of the most advanced I’ve built. I used a WordPress base but then built lots of custom taxonomies and custom post types to allow the client to add tour dates, artist pages and multimedia.

This is the best site I’ve built in terms of finding out what is capable with WordPress and the additional functionality and customisation that can be built into a WordPress build.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, jQuery, WordPress, Soundcloud API, YouTube API, Google Fonts API
Work completed: November 2012

2fortheroadevents.com

Over the past year I have been mainly focusing on running social media campaigns for Alphawave Media in Lewes, as well as spending more and more time writing about and researching South American music (more info at whatslater.com). However, over the past few weeks I have designed two holding pages that I just wanted to share here.

mulatu-astatke.com – Mulatu Astatke is an incredible Ethiopian musician who has been getting much global recognition over the past 10 years. I have designed his holding page for his first website and will be helping design the main site too.

senzalacreperie.co.uk – Senzala Creperie is a small restaurant in Brixton Village, which funnily enough makes exceedingly good crepes. I’m currently working on their full site, but in the meantime there’s a lovely holding page right here.

And that’s all you’re getting for now!

Best,
Russ (Lead Designer)

Link-building has become a much-maligned element in the world of SEO, but it needn’t be like that. One of the problems it has suffered in the last couple of years has been a lack of creativity. It was inevitable that Google would take a negative stance towards SEO (as it did with it’s Penguin and Panda updates) at some point and the fact that many SEO practitioners had got lazy meant that it was very easy for Google to spot all that black hat SEO.

However, with a little diversity and a little extra care you can build a successful SEO campaign. I’m currently working on an SEO campaign for Perpetual Solutions, a network, IT and technology training company. They want to achieve really well in Google searches for “network training”, a hugely popular search term. To get there though we’re going to focus on a number of less popular searches first, using a diverse range of keywords as well as different landing pages. It’s this kind of diversity that Google is fine with, it’s when you always use the same keywords and the home page as the landing page that they get mad.

These are the keywords that we’ll be linking to (with the landing page linked in):

Broadcast Training Course
Cloud Training
Fibre Training
Network Training Course
SIP Training
Telecom Training Courses
UMTS Training

By building links to a wide variety of landing pages and also varying the link text (such as using ‘UMTS Training Course’ instead of ‘UMTS Training’ from time to time, and also concentrating on a wide variety of sites to place the links, we are able to build a diverse, effective link portfolio that Google will not be able to criticise.

Over the past six months (beginning in August 2012) I have been working as a freelance SEO Specialist for Alpha Wave Media, an internet marketing company in Lewes (near Brighton). As part of this job I have been working on SEO campaigns for Britannia Movers International, Britannia Shipping, House & Son, Parker Dann and Sarah Edmunds, as well as launch Alpha Wave’s first social media campaign, with the aim of building a strong Twitter following for Perpetual Solutions, and IT and networking training company.

This work has distracted me from working on web design projects, but does mean that I can now help future clients better if they have SEO or social media needs.

Cajoo is a start-up travel company linking Brazil and the UK. This was functionally a very simple site as it only needed to present content as well as allow people to contact the company. The same could not be said of the design aspect. We designed a fluid, mosaic pattern for all content using jQuery’s vGrid script. This resulted in an eye-catching, distinctive design that created a unique identity for the company.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, jQuery, WordPress, Google Fonts API
Work completed: May 2012

www.cajoo.com.br

Carlos Acosta International Dance Foundation is a charitable organisation that sets up dance schools worldwide. They required a main website that would provide information on the Foundation, facilitate payment of donations and allowed users to easily make contact and register for updates. A large focus was therefore on creating an easy system for making small donations (PayPal), a simple contact form and an additional form to join the mailing list (Mailchimp).

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, jQuery, WordPress, PayPal API, Cufon, Mailchimp API
Work completed: July 2012

carlosacostafoundation.org

Como No is a Latin event promotions company based in London. They needed a website that would allow them to display all their upcoming events. This was the main focus. They also wanted to have distinctive appearances on several pages to highlight different events, as well as an archive of past events. This was undoubtedly the most complex site I have designed. It uses a WordPress CMS and heavy use of jQuery. It also incorporates Soundcloud and Youtube APIs to deliver audio and video content.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, jQuery, WordPress, Soundcloud API, Youtube API
Work completed: Jan 2012

www.comono.co.uk