Their website (www.active-aid.co.uk) has been updated with a new design and also restructured to make it easier for visitors to find the course they are looking for.

I did all the technical stuff, programming, database etc but the new graphic design was by Helen Belshaw of Just H Design.

This replaces his ColdFusion site which was too complicated and required a lot of clicking to view images. For his new site Malcolm wanted something he could easily manage and that would work as a ‘calling card’ for galleries to quickly view a selection of his works.

The new site is written in PHP and MySQL and has simple administration screens which Malcolm can use to upload images and modify text. The site presents the information on a single page to quickly get the essentials over to hard-pressed gallery owners.

Swinton Park is a country estate at Masham in Yorkshire and offers a hotel with 31 bedrooms, a cookery school, spa and estate activities.

The graphic design was provided to me and I then built the site using the WordPress content management system.This involved quite a lot of customization of WordPress to create a visual theme for the site and to build plug-ins to make the website behave as required.

Previously the content of the website was managed using Adobe Dreamweaver which meant that it was difficult for staff at the hotel to manage the content, to add new pages and to incorporate them into the menu without calling on me to do that. Using WordPress they now have much greater control over the website.

Publishers of nonconformist poetry, Barque Press was founded by Andrea Brady and Keston Sutherland in 1995. Since then, they have published over 40 chapbooks and six perfect bound books. One of these, 100 Days, was reviewed in The Guardian and recommended as a Book of the Year for 2001 in the New Statesman. Barque has published poets from the UK, US, France and Canada.

The new website has details of their authors and publications, all of which can be purchased online.

Thanks to DesignWorks – http://www.thedesignworks.co.uk/ – for the graphic design on this one.

The move was made for two reasons, firstly it seems a bit silly paying for hosting when I have my own server.

Secondly, the site is built using WordPress and I wanted to turn on permalinks so that my pages have friendly URLs like www.philmeades.co.uk/portfolio instead of www.philmeades.co.uk/?page_id=9.

My server is Windows 2008 running IIS7. Getting permalinks running on a Windows server with an earlier specification is somewhat, er, challenging and I’ve never managed it successfully. With IIS7 it’s dead simple – you just need to make sure you have the ‘URL Rewrite Module’ installed in IIS (it was already installed on my server) and then add a Web.Config file to the root of your website.

It’s all detailed here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/

I’ll miss the hills but I won’t miss the cold and the rain and hope for drier and milder weather here in Devon. Plus there’s some proper seaside down here. Finally, I grew up in Cornwall and still have some family there so this is almost a return home.

I already have clients all across the country from Penrith to London so anyone who already works with me to look after their website can be assured of the same great service as before.

Hopefully, I’ll soon have some new clients here in Devon as well!

Everything is now on my new server at Dedipower in the UK. It took around 3 months (as predicted) to gradually transfer everything over.

Next time I think I’ll try to find some faster means of upgrading the server. Maybe just see if it’s possible to clone the whole disk and move it into newer hardware.

It now features a pop-up preview image when you hover your mouse over a thumbnail image and a bit more information about each image such as dimensions and file size. Also, you can now save images in a ‘lightbox’ for later downloading.

Finally, it also features a great new design from DesignWorks in Staveley – www.thedesignworks.co.uk.

WordPress was originally designed purely for blogging but has grown to become a more generalised CMS. Its appearance can be modified by the use of ‘Themes’. At launch this site is using the ‘Cleanr‘ theme. Very basic but if you saw my old website you know that’s how I like it.

The content of the website has barely changed but I’ll try to keep it more up to date in the future and maybe also post to the blog.