Sojo Media Portfolio
Graham Macdonald, painters and decorators based in Ancrum in the Scottish Borders, had never had a website before and it was a delight to work with Graham to create their first ever web presence.
The new website has photographs and information about their high quality work - exterior, interior, tiling and Ames taping - along with a bank of testimonials and contact details and form, all editable and controlled by Graham.
The design used the Graham Macdonald colours and a crisp and classic font to reflect the quality of the workmanship by Graham and his team.
Go to the Graham Macdonald Painters and Decorators, Scottish Borders, site
StAnza
StAnza, Scotland's International Poetry Festival, had a demanding brief for their website redesign and, having worked with them on their previous site and throughly enjoyed the experience, we were delighted to be chosen to help create StAnza Mark 2!
Our challenge was to duplicate the flexibility of the previous site in a new CMS which gives the editors control over the content, and to incorporate the separate StAnza blog and Poetry Map as well as new functionality for sound files, mapping, video embeds searchable archive and other neat features - all in a smart and clever updated design.
The site launched with the StAnza Poetry Festival 2016 programme and is going from strength to strength, thanks to the incredibly committed StAnza team.
Go to the StAnza site
Susan Cross Jewellery
Susan Cross, award-winning jeweller based in Edinburgh, wanted a site that would do justice to the beautiful images of her fabulous work.
This was a lovely site to work on. It felt as though all the design elements were already in place and all we had to do was to provide a simple backdrop for them!
Susan can update her site to add new pieces whenever she wants and of course the site is responsive for mobiles and tablets.
Go to the Susan Cross site
Anna King
Anna King's fully content-managed website places her striking landscape paintings and monoprints in a clean white setting.
An important part of Anna's brief for us was to create a gallery which allowed her complete control over the sizing and positioning of her work on the page.
Our clever functionality lets Anna create rows of paintings, and the CMS automatically resizes the images to fit depending on the number she adds to each row. In addition, re-ordering within a row is easy, as is re-ordering the rows themselves, which means that Anna has great flexibility in the presentation of her work..
As with all our recent websites, Anna's site is fully responsive, whih means that content scales effortlessly for tablets and mobiles as well as desktops.
Go to the Anna King site
Common Good Food
Common Good Food is a new charity which offers practical solutions to small-scale food production, by planning and delivering hands-on skills based training, technologies and cultural activities to communities all over Scotland..
CGF wanted a home page full of impact which includes a step-trhough slideshow, including video, leading to promoted content.
The CGF site has a potentially complex set-up of 4 distinct strands of content. Through tagging content, the CGF team can ensure that - for example - a reader of a Technologies page can see a teaser for a related Technologies blog post or a Technologies event.
Giving people easy access to great resources is important for GGF and the Resources pages are built up from 'field collections', so that each resource displays an image / video embed / Issuu embed / text description / document download / link, or any combination thereof, giving huge flexibility within an easy-to-update system.
Go to the Common Good Food site
Turret House, Kelso
Turret House in Kelso is a wonderful historic property dating from 1678 and with its own stone spiral staircase! It was restored by the National Turst for Sotland and is now a lovely self-catering holiday home full of period detail.
The new website is fully content-managed so that Kevin and Pat can update it whenever they want, and links to the SuperControl online booking system.
We incorporated the stunning photos in a rotating slideshow, and made room for the very complimentary testimonials from their happy clients.
Go to the Turret House site
Kelso Music Society
Kelso Music Society is a community-based organisation, dedicated to bringing international chamber musicians to the people of Kelso and the surrounding area.
The core of the new site is the concert functionality, which woks in three parts. Firstly, the KMS team creates the individual concerts with images, text and videos.Once created, the new concert is shown in the 'teaser' listings and its main image is picked up for the home page 'mosaic'. Finally, the whole concert season is automatically archived to the Archive page once the season is over.
Of course, the website visitor is unaware of the smart thinking behind the scenes and simply sees a stylish, welcoming and helpful website.
Go to the Kelso Music Society site
Community Ownership Support Service
The Community Ownership Support Service (COSS), a Scottish government funded programme set up to help community-based groups in Scotland to take on land or building assets, needed a re-design of their website.
While the existing site was well used, there was a lack of clarity in the way the excellent materials were presented.
The re-design focussed on function and usability, improving the access to information and resources with unambiguous calls to action in a simpler business-like space.
Go to the Community Ownership Support Service (COSS) site
Beastie Assemblage by Linda Lovatt
Beastie Assemblage is the name for the quirky and cute Beastie Brooches, Bangles, Necklaces and Assemblages, which are hand-crafted by Linda Lovatt in her beautiful gallery and workshop in Jedbugh in the Scottish Borders.
Inspired by her delightful watermill garden, Linda creates little verdigris copper birdies, hares, foxes, dragonflies, owls and mice, decorated with vintage china, beads, buttons and anything pretty.
As well as designing a brand new CMS responsive site for Linda, we have built a Drupal Commerce / PayPal shopping cart so that her customers can purchase their own Beasties.
In addition the website supports trade accounts so that Linda's trade customers no longer need to fill in a paper form, but can log in to the website and use the trade prices shopping cart to order their items quickly and easily.
Linda's customers can read about her Lovatt Gallery in Jedburgh's High Street, find a stockist and keep up-to-date with her latest projects via her Blog.
On the admin side, there are great tools and reports to track orders and make sure that customers are kept informed by automatic email of the progress of their order.
Lovely photography of the products and Linda's own illustrations enhance the site, and there is even a little birdsong on the home page to relax and charm the site visitor!
Go to the Beastie Assemblage site
Creatif Works
creatifworks required a new content-managed internet presence to showcase its consultancy, training and coaching services.
We designed the website to reflect the creativity and imagination that imbues everything creatifworks does, using text and strong image in a clean, uncluttered space.
The warmth and clarity of their approach had to shine through, in a website for corporate clients that is interesting and inviting – and anything but corporate.
The design is responsive, which means that it rescales effortlessly and attractively for tablets and mobiles as well as desktop computer screens.
Go to the creatifworks site
Brian Johnstone
Brian Johnstone, poet, wrtier and performer, came to us to help him get his wonderful and diverse body of work online.
His much-admired website offers his visitors a wealth of material from poems and books to collaborations with other artists and performance audio/video clips - with Brian's photographs offering a captivating visual balance to the words.
Brian has full control of updating the website and a large number of "content types" behind the scenes means that text and images slot seamlessly into place when new content is uploaded.
Go to the Brian Johnstone site
Melrose Primary Schoole
Melrose Primary School is another in our stable of Scottish Borders school websites.
The staff at Melrose had struggled with updating their previous content management website and are finding the new Drupal site a breeze in comparison. As well as the usual features we provide for our school sites, we built in some new functionality for Melrose which allows them to attach permission slips to calendar events. Parents can download the permission slips from the calendar page, or from the Parent Downloads page - which also 'picks up' all the downloads from the rest of the site so that users don't have to search about through the pages for a document.
Little things that make a difference!
Go to the Melrose Primary School site
Selkirk High School
Selkirk High School saw our Eyemouth High School site and decided that a similar open and light feel would suit their needs
We worked with the website team to create a site that suited Selkirk High School's needs, incorporating a number of useful features such as Important Documents and Quick Links easily accessible from the home page as well as an easily updateable calendar and a series of administrative roles to allow for different levels of site updating.
Go to the Selkirk High School site
Kate Downie: Artist
Kate Downie RSA came to us after seeing our Anna King site. She liked the simplicity and the way that the work was presented. Nothing seemed to get in the way between the viewer and the artist and that is what she wanted for her own website.
The design is pared down to basics so that all the focus is on the images, which is how it should be. We also worked with Kate to find the best way to present a large amount of text on the CV and Writing pages, and have set up the News section so that she can update it herself, using an online form.
This has been an exciting project for us and working with Kate has been a great pleasure. She has a strong clear vision of how her work should look online, which made our life easy. All we had to do was make that vision a reality.
Go to the Kate Downie site
Springwood Estate: Holiday Homes Kelso
Springwood Estate - Set in gorgeous estate parkland near Kelso, Springwood Estate caters for those looking for a holiday home in the lovely Scottish Borders.
Springwood wanted a new website that would match the quality of their holiday park - no mean feat as we discovered when we visited the beautifully kept grounds. With lush green lawns, flowers and mature trees, and surrounded by countryside, it is a real haven.
So how to convey all this to new site visitors? Luckily for us, Springwood Estate already had a large number of excellent photographs, which immediately painted a picture of the attractions of the holiday park. We felt that it was important that the copy should also help to 'paint the picture' for our site visitors, so we used our copywriting skills to completely re-write the content. Our aim was to move beyond the basic facts of the previous website towards a much more friendly approach which reflects the warm and welcoming atmosphere at Springwood Estate.
We have set up a simple CMS to make it easy for Springwood staff to update their used and new holiday home sales, as well as to present 'touring area full' messages.
In addition to the holiday homes, Springwood Estate is also home to a retirement village and an area for touring caravans, so we designed the home page to reflect the multiple options, making it as clear as possible for the site visitors.
Go to the Springwood Estate site
Other Websites
