Website Design Aberystwyth, Wales

Merry Christmas from Pixelwave Web Design

As a family, we’re not sending Christmas cards this year.  Instead we have donated the money we would normally spend on cards and postage to the charity DebRA (http://www.debra.org.uk/).  This is in memory of 14 year old Angharad, daughter of friends of ours, who passed away earlier this year having lived with the condition Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) since she was born.

I have decided to extend this to my business clients as well. Not only does it allow me to support a worthwhile charity, but it saves paper, trees, the posties back and gives you one less thing to throw away after Christmas.

So, please accept this email as a opportunity for me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

With Best Wishes,Alan.

And to make it feel a little more Festive, here’s a snowy scene from our garden last year.

Merry Xmas from Pixelwave Web Design

Pixelwave Web Design has recently finished work on a brochure style website for a local luxury holiday accommodation provider in Wales.

Bay Cliff and the Lodge are quality, comfortable self-catering holiday lets in Borth, Wales. Run by the third generation of a family of holiday accommodation providers in the area.

Website Design for Holiday Accommodation

I built a website for these clients to showcase their other holiday accommodation in the area a few years ago and have since been maintaining this site for them and working on other design projects such as desktop publishing for them since. Earlier this year their daughter started renovating these new properties and approached me to build the website for them.

The new wesbite is a brochure style site that promotes the properties and their location. The website reflects the high standard of the properties and the modern decor so has a very bright, airy modern feel to it. I’m pleased with the overall look of the site and so are my clients.

It’s always good to see people recommend my services and I wish my clients all the best with their new venture.

You may have noticed that things have been a little quiet in the ‘Latest News’ section here at Pixelwave Web Design for a while. Don’t worry, I’m still here and working away as usual, but I haven’t had much time to update the news pages. First up I had a family holiday and wedding to attend to which of course means not only a week or so away, but a week preparing for it and a week catching up afterwards, with no time to update the News.

As a Freelance Website Designer working on my own, I arrange emergency cover for my clients with a local software development company so that should there be any emergencies whilst I’m away and out of contact they can at least attend to them. I do of course make sure that all of my clients realise that there will be times when I’m not in the office and that I can’t be available 24/7 365 days a year. For most people this is fine and the personal, friendly, helpful service I provide more than makes up for this. There are plenty of large agencies out there that can provide a 24/7 service but this comes at a cost and often a loss of the personal service that is so importnat to many.

After the holiday I did a 24 hour Mountain Bike race and then came down with flu. Before I knew it this became a chest infection and then I was admitted to hospital for a couple of days. Throughout all of this I’ve been working, updating sites for my clients, adding new content, working on new sites and keeping up to date with paperwork and admin, but something had to go and that was the updates to the Latest News section here.

I won’t go through the work I’ve been doing, but it has been business as usual (afterall as a freelancer there is no such thing as sick pay!), I’ve just been less proactive than usual whilst battling with flu. I don’t think anyone has noticed though as I’ve managed to prioritise well and respond to and implement things as quickly as usual. I’m just looking forward to being fully fit again so that I can get ahead of the game rather than just keeping up.

Around this time last year I posted an article about using Google Analytics to monitor your website traffic. I’ve been using this service (along with other Stats Analysis programs) since then for my websites and Google have just updated the interface of their Google Analytics program.

The new interface is a definite improvement. As far as I can tell there isn’t any new functionality or any new features but the new interface makes finding and analysing your websites traffic stats easier than ever. The visual interface helps you to monitor trends and see how advertising campaigns etc have affected traffic to your website.

Monitoring the traffic and the routes visitors take through your website should be an essential part of every website owners routine tasks and knowing where your visitors come from and what they are searching for is invaluable when planning how best to take your website forward.

Announcement from datacenter:
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We are opening an emergency maintenance window beginning 22:00 UK time on Sunday 5th Nov 2006.

During this time we will be performing a reboot of our core aggregation stack, this will cause complete loss of connectivity for all customers while the devices reboot and reconfigure.

Depending on the result of this reboot we may also be performing further diagnosis or a software update on the stack, if this is the case then further reboots may be required.

Total outage time for each reboot is anticipated to be approximately 5-10 minutes.

We apologise for the outage caused by this essential work.

On Friday morning (3rd November, GMT) cPanel and Apache will be updated on all Pixelwave Web Design servers to the latest stable versions. This is part of our regular maintenance in order to keep software on our servers up to date. Sites may be unavailable for a couple of seconds while this work is carried out.

Please also note that Neomail will be discontinued from within cPanel. Horde and Squirrel Mail will still be available as before..

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact Pixelwave Web Design.