An event which we recommend if you are thinking of starting out, getting bigger and better if you are already up and running, and find out how to grow if you have been trading for years.
Most of the events are free, or at a small cost for an event of this type. The programme is as follows:
Monday – Business basics day – Starting from scratch, with the essential business topics that you’ll need to understand to get going in business.
Tuesday – Innovation day – Learn how to make the most of your ideas. Culminating with a keynote by Lord Sugar.
Wednesday – Womens Enterprise Day – Meet a whole host of female entrepreneurs, who are just getting started to big names.
Thursday – Social enterprise day – The way of doing business that makes a positive social or environmental change. Find out the steps to make your business more ethical.
Friday – Home enterprise day – Taking advantage of the flexibility home working brings. Learn some top tips, and what it takes to make it. There will also be a free online seminar for this during the week of the event.
The essentials guide (PDF) is a great start for anyone who wants to run a business. It’s a handpicked list of the websites, booms and databases that will help you find what you need to know, and fast.
The green and ethical industry guide brings together all the best information for starting a social enterprise of ethical business.
We have revised and repackaged our most popular software applications to make it clearer for you what we can offer you, and to showcase the most state of the art open source software available.
Using open source software means you are not tied into any licence agreement with us or any other third parties. If you wish us to keep the content management or ecommerce platform up to date, its a very straight-forward software upgrade. Open source also means the software is contributed by the community of developers like us, who write plugins or extensions to make the software flexible and scalable like never before.
All the solutions are web based, meaning there is no software to install on your machine, so you can access the admin area of your site and edit pages wherever you are in the world!
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS (CMS)
CUSTOM: Hand written custom code, unique to your sites requirements.
STANDARD: Wordpress – Excellent admin for managing site, very powerful CMS and publishing platform, many plugins to make integration with third party sites, rich media and social networks a breeze.
LIGHT: CushyCMS – Easy to use, lightweight, unilimited users, unlimited pages, no training required.
» CMS prices start from £1,000, depending on site features, and flexibility of editing your site content.
ECOMMERCE
CUSTOM: Hand written custom code integrated into new or existing web site, , unique to your sites requirements.
STANDARD: Magento – Super powerful CMS and ecommerce platform, for up to 1000 products and beyond. Over 1 million downloads. Being adopted by some big international companies as they realise the potential.
LIGHT: Shopify or WP-ecommerce (using Wordpress) – Adding these extensions to a site adds ecommerce functionality seamlessly. For up to 100 products.
» Ecommerce prices start from £1,000, depending on how number of products, and the payment provider, ie: Paypal, Google Checkout or a merchant account, like Protx.
Not sure about what you are looking for? Don’t worry, our first job when we talk to new clients is always to listen and then devise a web strategy on how we can make your web project a complete success. Contact us
We are pleased to announce the start of our free client e-guides.
In a series on monthly publications we will be publishing free e-guides for you to download for free. You are welcome to share and print these eguides amongst your company or organisation.
Who are these eguides for?
The guides are in PDF format, in a print friendly format you and colleagues can use for building up a well rounded knowledge of web trends and technologies.
Whether you are a manager, a stakeholder or you someone who is looking at making web sites work harder this collection of eguides is for you. We want to help those who are less internet-savvy through the digital minefields.
We realise that there is a huge choice of services and tools on the web to choose from, we want to be able to explain in simple terms what this means to you and how they can help you save time and money as well as increasing your productivity.
Download our first client e-guide
Our first eguide ‘what makes good copy?’ covers an often over-looked part of web sites. Well structured copy can dramatically improve the feel of your web site, and convey a message to visitors that will make clear, compelling offers. The e-guide also includes copywriting dos and dont’s, and a recipe for “good copy”.
We were pleased to be interviewed by Dave Chaffey – who is one of the UK’s best known professional in search and marketing.
Where we discussed a variety of subjects, including ‘user centered design’, and meeting client business goals. As well as showing some examples of effective and clear design process that make it easy for a site user to understand how a web site can help them in their task to achieve their tasks on the web.
Perhaps the most important question for a client is ‘essential pitch questions’ that you should ask any web design company, to help distinguish between an agency that will be good, and one that is going to be great and deliver results.
We hope 2009 has started well for you so far? As this is our first post this year I want to look ahead to what the market is doing and also promote some of our activities.
Firstly, it seems as if the coming year will be a challenging time for most of us. But running a small business is all about tackling and overcoming challenges, so in many respects, it’s business as usual. It’s just that the difficulties we now face are different to those we’ve battled in the past.
‘While it’s difficult to tell what will happen in the wider economy, web design has remained robust through numerous economic ups and downs”
He reasons for the increase on our reliance with online services – even if shops close down and staff laid off, products need selling and websites need creating and maintaining. This means freelancers, in-house staff and agencies should be busy, even when others are losing their jobs’
What should you be doing as a design company?
Our main aim for this current economic climate is to continue to have empathy for users, base our work on a strong design process based on site users and client business goals.
Continue to look ahead, embrace and adopt new technologies and assess their usefulness for your clients work.
Diversify your capabilities and services/products you offer to appeal to a wider client base.
Get organised, form teams of compatible skills through your networks to increase your chances of being able to respond to a wider set of briefs
Think beyond the desktop browser – get a head start and learn about the web on a smaller screen
If you have a quiet time you can still be proactive – here’s some ideas:
Teach yourself new skills
Get out meet new contacts for coffee
Get off-line and you may find it easier to focus on what is important for your business
What we have planned for 2009:
Client guides – In a series of free ebooks we will explain to our new and existing clients about current web services, trends and technologies in easy to follow guide
Training freelancers and mentoring local colleagues
Work with our peers
Develop International business opportunities
Attending conferences, meetups and networking events, and also attend more non-technical events (no not knitting classes)
How you are going to stay confident, fresh and stay relevant in this industry? We’d love to know, comments are on..
Where to start! What a year 2008 was (to recap this was 2007’s review).
So 2008 was all about collaboration, online, with local colleagues and forging new projects and relationships with clients and friends alike, here’s what happened at Callender Creates:
2008, the year my girlfriend started to use the mobile web!
Designed and developed a variety of ecommerce, content managed and social networking sites for a variety of UK based clients, startups, agencies, local government and councils
Our biggest achievement in 2008
To take on large projects and successfully work collaboratively with local colleagues and achieve results at much higher quality than a individual would be able to produce.
Looking ahead into 2009 – Guardian online have picked the web’s cream of the crop, their latest selection finds that location-based services, work-anywhere collaboration and video are prominent – 100 top sites for the year ahead
To all the people we’ve worked with in 2008, to all our readers, family, friends, peers and everybody else. A big thank you and looking forward to more success and interesting work in 2009.
A list of the most popular articles on Callender Creates in 2008
INTRODUCTION easthampshire.org is a community site which features daily news updates and an extensive event listings of what’s happening in and around the the East Hampshire Area. Also interactive maps, and information on towns and villages in East Hampshire.
This is not the main portal site for EHDC as you may think, but a companion/sister site that has features that are useful for anyone wanting to learn more about the East Hampshire area.
You don’t have to live in East Hampshire to be able to appreciate that in a traditionally rural area so much is happening. Furthermore, you don’t have to register to enjoy the wealth of information constantly being added to the site, however, to get the customisable and personalised features that the site offers you can register for free.
COMMUNITY BASED SITE
EHDC want the site to be a hub for community information with free pages for groups, customisable profiles, and links to other local websites.
As you can visit the site and learn about the area, also the people that feature on the site. We hope it wil draw people closer together in this rural county. It features content generated by members on the site, as well as featuring social networking features such as member profiles, being able to comment on various sections of the site. As the site grows from visitors generating content as well as the EHDC team publishing content, it means that for the first time a two way dialogue on-line can be created on a local government site.
Visitors to the site can learn from a number of interesting sections on the site – news, events, towns and villages, and local groups. You can pinpoint the news for example down to street level – using geo-coding and Google maps on the interactive map, something that has not been done at this level before by a council run site.
All visitor’s to the site have the opportunity to submit their own news or event item, which is moderated by the EHDC team and then published on the site. As a group admin, a club secretary for a local club or group – for example, the Greatham Gardeners club group, they can add events automatically to the site, using a form that sends their details directly to Yahoo Upcoming. This information is then pulled back into the site, and featured on their group page. Allowing all visitors to learn about the group, and possibly attend the event.
As part of this ‘add event’ feature the person entering details into the form can geo-code the event, as well as ‘tag’ the event – meaning the event is shown on various parts of the site at the same time, as well as being featured on upcoming’s service.
For example view the event for “Plants and Gardens of the Italian Lakes at Greatham Village Hall” on easthampshire.org, listing detail, map detail and the same listing on upcoming.
SOCIAL FEATURES
The site is quite innovative in the way it uses already existing web services to do the work for us. Why create something that is already working and proven? We have integrated social elements in the site using the API’s of Yahoo’s upcoming, del.ico.us, and Google Maps. We also have geo-coded events and news items, so users can get driving directions for events, for example. And also find out where exactly that news item is referring to.
The events all feature hcalendar using microformats. With the correct coding we have structured the event listing so that that search engines and other aggregators can retrieve such events, automatically convert them to iCalendar, and use them in any iCalendar application or service, such Google calendar.
Although not a social feature, we have added OpenID to the site, so users don’t have to remember their username and password. With OpenID, it means that users can log on to different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on. This relates to data portability and means that you don’t have to remember all those different passwords for each website account.
CUSTOMISABLE FEATURES
The main aim is to let people be creative and pull their information from various sources on this site, as well as external sites.
By choosing which town or village you are interested about during registration, boxes featuring events and news based on your choice will automatically appear on your homepage.
There is a ‘netvibes’ style homepage where you can move the boxes around the page depending on your preference. You can also choose which boxes appear. As well as having your delicious bookmarks on your easthampshire homepage.
The RSS page means users can be updated by using their RSS reader on new details on any town or village in East Hampshire.
WHAT’S NEXT?
We’d love to hear your feedback either on here, or directly on the site. Is this the future for council sites that are embracing current and future web technologies?
We hope this will attract some attention from other community sites, and set new standards in how councils can communicate with member of the public.
The site is still in beta and we have more interesting features planned for the site planned, early 2009. Watch this space!
For more information checkout easthampshire.org’s brochure:
Global Entrepreneurship Week at the British Library 16-20 November 2009.
