Ghost Design Consultants Ltd.

Today we’re please to announce the addition of a new hosting package – our dedicated option.

Before today, all sites we hosted on behalf of our clients were located on a shared host. This means the site exists on a server which contained hundreds, if not thousands, of other sites. While this is a perfectly acceptable solution for some smaller sites, when you have a behemoth site like the British Limousin Cattle Society, it can suffer from a lack of resources.

This is why we’re now offering a dedicated hosting package to our larger customers. So if we feel your site could benefit from an upgrade, we’ll be in touch soon.

We don’t often spend over £2,000 on new software for our office, but when we do, we appreciate a freebie or two.

Step in Jigsaw24, our software supplier, who obviously knew our love of freebies, who, as a thank you for our custom, sent us a free Refreshers.

While we would like to thank them for their generosity, it has caused some issues in the office, with Daniel and Lauren not talking to me after I didn’t share it with them…

…well, I am the boss.

If you happen to be strolling past a newsagent at any time in the next month or so, why not take a moment out of your busy day to find a copy of the April edition of .net magazine. If you do happen to find yourself looking at said copy of .net, take a look at page 104, and have a read.

Challenges

If all of that sounds like too much effort, let me save you a trip – you’d find yourself staring at a large photo of me, and the article that I wrote on the challenges of being a lone developer. (more…)

After yet another manic week Christmas has finally arrived at Ghost. Despite the decorations in Leamington having been erected over a month ago we have managed to ignore the festive fever. This week however we were asked by Bid Leamington (located in the courtyard, at the bottom of our steps) to create a Christmas eshot and micro site, to advertise the Golden Ticket event taking place in Leamington shops over the Christmas period. You can take a look at what we did and check out some of the fantastic prizes up for grabs (certainly worth a look) www.leamingtongoldenticket.co.uk

This in turn spurred us on to start designing our own Christmas card, which we have decided to print rather than send via email (you can’t stand an email on your desk now can you!) Lauren and I have spent the rest of this week producing what has turned out to be the biggest Limousin magazine ever! I have been producing this particular publication three times a year for 12 years now and it just gets better and bigger every time, this edition is a whopping 80 pages!!! No time to rest though as we are also producing the 350 page yearly review for the British Limousin Cattle Society entitled the ‘Stud Book’, so if anyone asks if Im having Turkey for Christmas my response will be no, BEEF!!

That has to be one of the most hectic weeks for a very, very long time. Tuesday brought us a new client, Ebco Eco Cycles, who needed us to take the 2011 range of electric bikes, and Photoshop them to represent the new 2012 range for a pitch to Halfords. It was quite a challenge, turning white bikes into black, changing handlebars and gearing and finally decorating them with a liberal sprinkling of new graphics. I hope the pitch went well!

We racked up design and artwork for a stunning 32 page  jewellery catalogue for Biagios and packed it off to print. Completed a 16 page newsletter (though its rapidly becoming a magazine) For The British Texel Sheep Society. We sent a day book for the Blue Strawberry Day Nursery  for proofing  and gained approval on some external signage for AWA Architects, which looked so good two other companies in their building have asked us to some for them too, bonus!

I spent Friday alone in the studio which was extremely fruitful, the P & Q allowing me to get most of the Worcester Cathedral 16 page newsletter done and sent for approval. Oh and I nearly forgot the dozen or so adverts for Limousin, Texel and Cenrtick Properties that punctuated the week.

It’s great to be busy and next week looks like it will continue in the same way, with the Limousin Stud Book, (a 320 page review of the year) and a 52+ page magazine running in tandem. Daniel will be back in the saddle on Monday (sorry two cycling puns in close succession) and he will be looking to finish two websites that are nearing completion as well as starting a new one for a brand new client!!

We will put some of this weeks work into the portfolio next week for you to look at, watch this space.

Today is a happy day for me, for it is today that, not one, but two, sites of my own creation, are going live.

The first is the very site you are viewing now – a re-design of our own company site. The design was supplied by our very own Terry Burrows, while the realisation on the web, and functionality within WordPress was done by yours-truly.

The other is Chameleon Photography, Ghost’s sister company. This is a radical departure from anything that I’ve done before, but I think it works well.

(Major thanks to the people at codrops who provided the inspiration and technology behind the site)

Allow me to introduce myself… my name is Daniel, I’m 32 years old, originally from south-east London, and have been hired by Ghost as a Web developer to replace Jay, who has gone onto greener pastures.

I’ve been interested in the World Wide Web, and building sites for it, since the late 1990s. In 2006, after many years of bedroom-based trial-and-error learning about the technology that powers the Web, I started at the University of Worcester, and three and a half years later I graduated with a First Class Honours BSc in Computing/Web Development. (more…)