Website Design Aberystwyth, Wales

Pixelwave web Design has recently started work on an eCommerce website for a plant nursery in Wales.

Pantyfod Garden Nursery is open to visitors and has a wide range of habitats as well as views across the surrounding countryside. All plants offered for sale by Pantyfod Gardens are grown in their own gardens and many are rare or unnusual.

Their new website will include information about the gardens and some of the techniques involved in cultivating their plants and will also feature an eCommerce section containing a comprehensive plant catalogue allowing the purchase of the plants by mail order.

I shall be working on the site over the coming weeks with a planned release date early in the new year.

As part of the ongoing development of Watch Obsession Pixelwave Web Design is about to start work on adding a Latest News / Weblog feature to the website.

Their new online watch shop went live recently and now to add interest, content and to keep the site up to date I shall be adding a fully featured weblog system. Such systems can be invaluable for adding interest to a website and increasing traffic. The regularly updated, relevant content found in the articles helps to broaden the appeal of the site to visitors and to search engine robots. Keeping it up to date not only keeps the site fresh and encourages repeat visits but also broadens the footprint of the site and, if the content is good, can also encourage the growth of inbound links.

Hopefully the weblog system will go live soon and I look forward to reading the content entered by the webmaster at WatchObsession.

Here at Pixelwave Web Design I have a few new projects in the pipeline that I shall write about here soon, but recently I’ve been working on minor updates to existing websites, and generally helping people out with their websites.

I recently took over the maintenance of Timberlane Books, a small academic publisher based in America. I have moved their site to a more suitable hosting provider, fixed several issues that had crept in to the existing site, restructured the website and have added some new pages. I didn’t design or code the website and to keep costs down I haven’t touched on this aspect of the site yet. The initial stages were just to get the website operational again and update it with some new content. No doubt as I work on it in the future I will attend to such things when I get the opportunity as working with outdated code isn’t much fun for me.

I have also set up a website for The Nuffield and Leyland Tractor Club using WordPress. The web master, John, was originally going to use one of the WordPress templates that Pixelwave Web Design offer for sale to set up the site himself.

As John had never built a website before and didn’t know anything about web-design I helped him as best I could with the set, but a database driven website was probably a little too ambitious as a first step so in the end they took the plunge and commissioned me to set it up for them. Again, to keep costs down and to allow John to do as much of it as he could himself I simply installed and configured the scripts and set up the database for them and then after a few tips on using the system left John to customise the template and add his own content. I’ve since done a few little updates for him and helped out where necessary but most of the work is down to John himself and the site is up and running and doing well.

In addition to general help and support I’ve also been working hard on the slickactivewear website which will hopefully launch soon and have been making good progress with the all new website for Cymric Cards…. When Christmas comes around I should be just about ready for a few days off!

Yesterday saw the release of a new online shopping facility for Watch Obsession built by Pixelwave Web Design.

I had previously built a simple brochure style website as a temporary measure for Watch Obsession and over the past few weeks have been working on an eCommerce solution for the business. Now they have a website with fully featured online shopping facilities allowing people to purchase their products online. Behind the scenes is of course an administration centre allowing the business staff to add and update their product catalogue, process orders and generally run the online business.

Watch Obsession themselves sell top of the range watches, straps and accessories for people with an ‘obsession for watches’. I spoke to the owners yesterday and they have already had some feedback about their new website, all of it positive, which is great news for them, great news for me and great news for their customers.

I shall be working on some new additions to the site in the near future and wish them all the best for their online watch shop.

Pixelwave Web Design is pleased to announce the release of a new website for Rhayader Dental Practice.

Click here to view more information on this website in my portfolio, or click here to visit the website of the Rhayader Dental Practice.

Pixelwave Web Design is pleased to have recently started work on the design and construction of a website for a local card company Cymric Cards. In fact, Cymric Cards is located just a few houses away from here which means that face-to-face meetings are easy which is always nice.

The website itself will be a fairly simple affair to describe the products and services offered by Cymric Cards and allow the download of catalogues and order forms. From a technical point of view it should be a fairly straight-forward website build, with the added twist of seasonal changes. Again, these seasonal changes should be fairly easy to implement. A number of simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), one for each season will be used and some PHP (Hypertext PreProcessing) will determine the season we are in and the stylesheet to use. This should allow the overall look and feel of the site to change automatically with the season. A nice approach to keeping the website interesting and relevant to the time of year. I think I will even suggest a few seasonal content changes to go with the aesthetic changes.

I’m pleased to announce the release of a new promotional brochure style website for Aberleri Seaside Cottages. These luxury cottages in the coast village of Borth offer traditional Welsh farmhouse charm with the comfort and luxury of modern living. They are located just a few minutes walk away from Borth, one of the sandiest award winning beaches on Cardigan Bay.

As these cottages are just a few minutes walk away from the Pixelwave Web Design office I’ve felt connected to this project from the outset. I even managed to sneak the odd photo of myself on the beach into the design! It also meant I have been able to meet with the cottage owners several times and have got to know them. As well as designing and producing their new website for them I have also been helping them with other IT related issues.

I hope their new site brings them plenty of new business and wish them all the best.

Pixelwave Web Design has just completed a rebuild of the website for a Shropshire based lawyer-mediator. Pixelwave Web Design has been managing this website for a few years now and Marc has recently restructured and re-organised the way he works, which meant his entire site had to be restructured too. The overall design and layout has remained unchanged, but all of the content and the information architecture has been changed to better describes the services he currently offers.

I wish Marc all the best for his new direction and hope to continue working on his website for years to come.

Regular readers of the news section here at Pixelwave Web Design could be forgiven for thinking I’ve been taking it easy and doing little work lately. That would be nice (although not for too long), but it is far from the truth. In fact, I seem to have been adopting various websites for people lately and in most cases this has simply involved arranging hosting for them, transferring the sites, setting up e-mails and troubleshooting. All of which means there has actually been very little to show here in the news section.

Many of these sites were built years ago by others so I’m not going to add them to my portfolio. Not only did I not build them, but they were built using what is now out of date coding, are not standards compliant and certainly couldn’t be considered accessible. Of course, now that Pixelwave Web Design has taken over the maintenance of these websites, any updates or additions that are required will be written using modern standards and practices and hopefully in time the entire sites (none of which are huge) will be rebuilt too.

I have of course also been working on some new websites a few of which are almost ready for release and as always there have been plenty of minor updates and help and support to keep me busy. Don’t worry, although there has been little of note for the news section, I’m not spending my time relaxing on the beach here in Wales.

It is always good to have a short break and get away from work for a few days, and I’ve not been back long from a 5 day break in the Isle of Man. However as a freelance website designer catching up after such a break always takes a day or two so I’ve been busy wading through a mountain of e-mails and catching up but I think I’m just about on top of things again… Now I could do with another holiday!

A number of my personal sites (Forces-of-Nature, A Simple Life of Luxury and Aber-Cachers) have been updated to keep up with recent opensource developments and updates. There have as always been some updates made to FairiesWorld and a few small additions have been made to Mannerbourne and Beacons Active.

I been tying up a few loose ends on the Slick Active Wear website which will hopefully launch later this week and various other projects that I am in the middle of are still in the pipeline (Intemerate Developments, Aberleri Cottages, Pigs on Weed, Glide Homes and Timberlane Books). I’ve also been frantically replying to emails, writing tenders and quotes and generally catching up on admin.

It is good to have caught up though as I can now concentrate on a few of the ongoing projects and maybe even find some time to work on a few ideas that I have planned for future projects. Despite the hectic catch up period I now feel refreshed and ready to sink my teeth into website design projects once again.