A quick thank you to everyone that attended our Wordpress Workshop in Winchester last night.  We certainly covered a great deal of ground in the three hours, moving from a general introduction to hands-on time posting new content and trying out the admin screens.

Our practical exercise for the evening involved creating a post about our favourite band, popstar or musician.  I can reveal to the world that our line-up for the evening included Take That, The Boy Least Likely To, Fleet Foxes, Johnny Cash, The Foo Fighters and Weezer.  I’ll let the attendees claim their performers in the comments below!

Auditel very kindly let us make use of their training room and I think it made a great venue.  Looking forward to the next one.

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.

One of the discussions I find myself having with new and old clients, involves the auction system in Adwords. Its an intricate mechanism involving the advertiser, the user and Google. Concepts like Quality Score, Relevancy and the importance of Landing Pages can be difficult to explain.

Luckily the Adwords team have just released a fantastic video tackling these very topics:

Thanks to @avinashkaushik for the tip off!

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!

Great video put together by Melih Bilgil as part of his work at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany.  The animation uses the icons Melih has developed as part of his effort to create a pictorial language for describing electronic communication.  Really worthwhile watching:

Auditel (UK) Limited are the leading cost management consultants operating in the UK.  The business consists of a network of over 100 consultants who offer cost and purchase management consulting to the business community in their area of the UK.  Each consultant in the network is actively promoting the Auditel service and the company’s head office in Winchester supports these efforts with marketing collateral and other promotional material. More…

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.