SEM Studio

We have recently launched a new site for the restaurant at Domaine Gayda (also known as Maison Gayda.) This restaurant looks fabulous, is in a stunning location (in the Languedoc, SW France,) and serves absolutely delicious food. Oh, and did I mention that it is also the winery for Domaine Gayda producing some of the most exciting new French wines from the Languedoc?

Eating at Maison Gayda is a wonderful experience and the time had come to redesign their website to reflect this. As the client also required full content management (CMS) it was decided to build the site in Drupal. The site went live last month (Jan ‘09) and has already received plenty of praise. Visit the site and sign up for their newsletter (a neat integration of PHPList with Drupal) to get a regular glimpse of life on a French vineyard.

Our work has been recognised by Rackspace - they have recently awarded us their Fantical Support Partner of the Year 2008 award. Since early 2007 we have been providing server migration services to Rackspace clients and have now become one of the leading server migration companies in the UK. Apart from referring clients that are looking for assistance with their migration, Rackspace also recommends us to their clients that are looking for Drupal development or ecommerce solutions.

Since winning the coveted award we have created a number of online tools and reference documents to assist those looking for help with a server migration. You can read about our migration services or if you require a quote you can complete our migration survey form.

We have just launched a new website for our friend Bob Ward at RL & CJ Light Cargo. Bob runs an excellent operation that is described as follows on the new home page: “RL & CJ Light Cargo Ltd operates across the UK and European mainland providing solutions to the freight industry and End User’s for express, time critical movements of all products.”
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This is the second website we have built for Bob and the new design reflects how far the firm has come since the early days when we built the first site. We’d like to wish Bob and his team a happy and prosperous 2009 and we look forward to working with them in the future.

Roof window sales at www.sterlingbuild.co.uk are going from strength to strength, even in the current economic climate. Growth over the past 12 months has been partly driven by the introduction of the range of Velux roof windows and more recently Velux blinds which are proving extremely popular. Continual SEO and improvements to the layout and usability of the website haver also helped increase traffic and conversion rates on the site. Perhaps more people are choosing to improve their properties by adding windows and carrying out loft conversions rather than move home given the challenging conditions in the housing market. We hope this trend continues.

The latest addition to our portfolio of SEM Store ecommerce sites is Julia Hart Facial Therapy, a site that provides serious skincare products. You will find some excellent brands on the site including: Dermalogica the worlds leading brand, Crystal Clear products with the new Medic Essential range. New to the UK is Mineralogie mineral make up. O2 Intraceuticals products are all formulated with a unique Hyaluronic Acid and apparently works wonders for dehydration! Julia is available for professional advice online or at her home clinic.

The beautiful design for the site was done by Sharon Havenhand of Comarni whom we have had the pleasure of working with on a number of occasions before. Top job Sharon.

The site is hosted by SEM on a Rackspace managed server.

We’d like to take this opportunity to with Julia great success with the site!

John Pester is one of the latest recipients of the SEM Store ecommerce solution. John is a brilliant watercolour artist and is selling his paintings on his new website at www.johnpester.co.uk. John is also running water colour and painting courses which he is advertising on the website.

In our role as a Rackspace Select Partner we have been asked to carry out a migration for the charity Help for Heroes. This means we will essentially be moving their website from their current hosting environment to a new managed server at Rackspace. I was not previously aware of this organisation but I’m glad I am now. They are doing amazing work and fundraising for the wounded in Britain’s conflicts and this week they are going to be featured on the X Factor! This will inevitably result in a huge surge of traffic to their website which is why they have decided to move to Rackspace.

We’ve recently completed another job working with Canonical. This time they asked us to redesign the new Ubuntu Shop for the US. Canonical felt we had a unique combination of ecommerce and creative skills and this helped us to win the work. In addition to designing the store and all the product pages we were commissioned to carry out a photo shoot to get some good material for the site. We decided to use Canonical / Ubuntu staff for the models to make the pics look more meaningful and to ensure that the passion of the people that work there is carried through to the site.

Supportershop.com, a leading online retailer of sport shirts (football, rugby, cycling etc.) have chosen SEMSolutions for a major overhaul of their global network of websites. Currently they have independently hosted copies of the main website (supportershop.co.uk) running for each country franchise, for example in France you would go to Supportershop.fr. We are merging and enhancing the ‘back office’ & databases of all of the Supportershop sites so that product and store management can be done centrally.
SEMSolutions were recommended to Supportershop by Rackspace.

One of the leading design agencies in the South East - WeLove72 - chose SEMSolutions as their development partner for the stunning new Berbank Homes website. WeLove72 produced the artwork and the developers at the SEMStudio built the site ensuring that the code meets the highest standards. A combination of XHTML, CSS, FLash and AJAX were used and we think this is one of the best looking sites that SEMStudio have worked on. Take a look at www.berbankhomes.com and decide for yourself.