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.

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.

We’ve just finished working on the new Launchpad tour which has recently gone live. The team here at SEMStudio were responsible for all the graphic design and coding (HTML, CSS & AJAX). It was probably one of the most interesting jobs I’ve been involved with as we got to work closely with Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical, Thawte, Ubuntu and the first African in space. The meetings we had to attend with Mark at first were nerve wracking but it wasn’t long before we settled into job and started getting very positive feedback from him. This was no mean feat - consider this; how do you impress a man that has been to space? The first time I met him I found myself completely lost for words - he asked me a simple question about our programming skills and I couldn’t give him a straight answer. I suppose this is what happens when your client is a world famous entrepreneur and pioneering space tourist with their own page on Wikipedia!

Back to Launchpad. As many of you will already know it is a “hosting service for open source projects that’s big on collaboration.” We had to get pretty familiar with it in the course of this work and its fair to say that it does have some very impressive features and if I ever decide to release any software under an open source license I will definitely be taking advantage of the Launchpad service.

SEM has recently completed a new site for Autouseful, a website with something for every motorist. The ecommerce is powered by the SEM Store and advanced CMS features were provided through the integration of the store with Drupal. This is not the first time we have integrated SEM Store ecommerce software and Drupal and together they are proving a very successful combination. Visit www.autouseful.co.uk to take a look at the site - the excellent design was done by Martin Jewiss of MPJDesign Ltd.

Ubuntu 8.04 went live this week along with the new Ubuntu demo tour that we designed for Canonical. This project has led to SEM being asked to do a demo tour for Launchpad.net that will be released in July.

Momui Home is a new home accessories boutique selling stylish and decorative gifts for the home and garden. Mo, the creative spark behind the business decided to use the SEM Store as her ecommerce solution. The site was designed by Sharon Havenhand of Comarni.

We really enjoyed building this store for Mo and would like to wish her every success with her venture.

Localis, the government think-tank have recently launched a new website - www.localisresearch.org - that was design by Sharon Havenhand of Comarni and development by SEM Solutions at the SEM Studio. Sharon’s work is always awesome and we always enjoy partnering with Comarni on development work. It really helps us here at SEM to play on our strengths - we prefer to focus on the coding and programming while someone else has to worry about the ‘creative’ aspect of the job.

Here’s a quote from the ‘About Us‘ page new Localis website that should give you a slightly better idea of what they get up to!

“At a time when the great bulk of local authorities are conservative and when existing local government think tanks veer to the left, Localis offers a fresh and distinctive approach based on close links with Policy Exchange, Prospect’s think tank of the year 2006-7. Localis aims to influence policy makers and thinkers outside the local government village in clear, jargon-free language.”

When I started SEM Solutions a few years ago I knew how to design a basic site and build a simple Flash movie. I also knew that there were other technologies and programming languages that offered a whole lot more in the way of interactivity and control over web sites but I didn’t know what they were. After consuming a few books and loads of excellent online resources such as MAXDESIGN.COM.AU and CSS ZEN GARDEN for CSS and formatting resources and O’REILLY MEDIA for general development resources I came to the conclusion that the future of web development lay with CSS, PHP and mySQL. Since then I have realised that a bit of Javascript and a few structural tables are needed as well but 4 years after making my decision I feel as if we are on the right track. I accept that CSS is a long way from perfect but the benefits outweigh the alternatives.

So, men of SEM, what do you think? Are we right to focus our skills on these technologies or are we going to box ourselves in a corner? Should we be branching out by becomming Microsoft certified? Your views are eagerly anticipated.