Searle & Taylor are a Ropley based firm offering bespoke design, manufacture and installation of beautiful kitchens.  Whether its the Austrian Contemporary range from ewe or the simplicity, understated Shaker-style Stockbridge range there is a design that will suit your new kitchen. If you’re looking for ideas for your next kitchen or simply want to take a look at some great kitchens visit their 3000 square foot showroom in Ropley, Hampshire.

SUGAR are very happy to be building a brand new site for Searle & Taylor in 2010 and look forward to spreading the word about this great local company.

We’ve just heard the good news that we have been given the opportunity to redesign the Paragons Personnel website.  Paragons, based in Romsey, have been offering recruitment services to Hampshire since 1985.  We’re looking forward to working with Lyn Ebdon, Iain McCreath and the rest of the team to improve and enhance their web presence.

Welcome onboard!

Shepheard-Walwyn are an independent publisher founded in 1972. Their catalogue covers a wide range of subjects including history, philosophy, poetry and ethical economics. SUGAR has been commissioned to establish a supporting website for one of their subject areas.  The new site will make use of the Wordpress blogging platform to establish a state-of-the-art platform for author promotion and subject discussion.

We are very excited to be working on such a worthwhile topic (we won’t spill the beans here!) and will post more details once the site goes live.

Carla Vize-Martin is an artist based in Winchester. Working with Piers Cross Design we’ve just completed the development of a new gallery site for Carla.  She currently has an exhibition running at Green’s Wine Bar, Jewry Street in Winchester, we’re looking forward to seeing the real thing!

At SUGAR we love working for diverse clients, so we got really excited when we were approached to build a portfolio site for a young new upcoming photographer, Nicola Litson. Nicola has recently completed her studies and is starting the process of getting her name out there. Her work was recently featured in the June issue of Professional Photographer.

All we have at the moment is a landing page, but look out for a new site launching for Nicola soon!

In 2001 Jenni and I moved over to the UK from South Africa. One of the first websites I built was for a friends dental practice in Winchester, Westgate Dental. Its taken awhile to get around to it, but this morning I’m happy to be launching a brand new site for Michael and the team.

It was interesting to go back into the old code and look at how much has changed since the site was developed. Table layouts have disappeared and been replaced with CSS reset files, divs and search engine friendly code. The Westgate site has always performed well on the search engines (try “Winchester Dentist“), so it’ll be interesting to see if we can improve the optimisation in the new version. In our experience the style of markup does have a significant effect on how well a site performs online.

We are using Wordpress to drive the news area and the client testimonial highlights. Thanks again to Rob Schlüter for the Archives for a category plugin. That is one of our favourites.

Now that the new Cohort Technology website is up and steaming along, we’ve turned out attention to Cohort’s sister company. Using a similar “look and feel”, we are setting up a new site to showcase Appspeed Distribution’s services and vendors.

Appspeed specialises in virtualisation, virtual desktop infrastructure and network management and security solutions.  Their vendor partners include Virtual Iron, Platespin, SANRAD and Stonesoft for virtualisation solutions. Virtual desktop infrastructure is covered by Quest Software and RES Software, management by RTO Software. Appspeed’s security solutions are provided by Evidian, Kanguru and St Bernard.

Oh yes, we’re starting to understand the language and soon we’ll be using VDI, SAN, virtual infrastructure and application lifecycle in everyday conversation!

Charters Estate Agents are a brand new business making waves in the property market around Winchester, Hampshire. SUGAR has been appointed to help give the new website a boost in the search engines. Robert, Elliott and the rest of the Charters Winchester team have been working the area for some time, and we’re excited about helping their agency make an impact on the local property scene.

We’ve just received news via Norman Grossman (Auditel’s PR Guru) that the www.auditel.co.uk site has been selected as a finalist in the annual Franchise Marketing Awards 2009. We’d like to thank our parents and our accountant Jim, we couldn’t do it without you.  But seriously, we wish all the other finalists good luck and thank you to the Auditel team for allowing us to work with such a great group of people!

During December we were contacted by the development team at Yell.com to pitch on some UI work for ongoing site improvements.  Yell.com is the UK’s leading source of business information.  We use it almost everyday here in the office, so it was something special to be asked to participate.

We’re delighted to report that the work has been awarded to SUGAR and David has been generating layout ideas for the Yell.com team for the last two weeks.