Alberon Newsletter - September 2009

Featured Project: Stowe School

Stowe School is an independent school in Buckinghamshire. They asked us to re-design and re-develop their website.

They wanted the visitor experience to be engaging, inspiring and reflective of the School's ethos, culture and brand values. Most of all, they wanted prospective parents and students to truly experience Stowe during their visit to the site.

We worked with communications experts One Ltd. to deliver a website that is both functional and visually impressive.

The website includes a section called "Meet the Teachers", where prospective parents and students can get to know the teaching staff.

The Video Shorts section allows visitors to get a much better sense of what the school is like than they could just reading words on the screen.

There are also separate areas of the site for Stowe House, Stowe Events, and the Old Stoic Society.

The site is content managed, so the staff at Stowe can manage the content of the website themselves.

Is your website no longer serving your business needs? Contact us today.

Project Spotlight: Contact Database for Garnet Garnet Education develop high-quality English language teaching materials. They required a system to help them to build better relationships with their potential customers. We developed them a customer relationship management system, closely tailored to their needs. Read the case study

Our Favourite Links

How do you find out about new stuff? Typically it is because a friend or colleague shows you something they find very useful. Here we share with you our personal favourites.

Tim - Wikipedia

As I'm sure you know, Wikipedia is collaborative encyclopedia. Anyone with internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles. You might expect the result to be chaos and unreliable information, but in fact Wikipedia is an extraordinary information resource. It's now my first online port of call when I want to find out about pretty much anything. I find it particularly good for things scientific and medical and also for general information about the I.T. industry. It's also worth noting that the software which powers Wikipedia, MediaWiki, is open source and freely available for anyone to download and set up their own wiki. We use it internally for our Alberon knowledge base. Let us know if we can help you do something similar.

Deborah - Google Desktop

Google Desktop indexes all the documents (including Word documents and PDFs), emails and cached web pages on your PC. This makes searching incredibly fast. Say you know that you created a document sometime last year for new joiners; now you cannot remember what it is called, but you know it contains the word P46. So you type that into Google Desktop and up comes a list of everything that contains "P46". It is great.

It is especially good when you are checking your credit card statement as you do every month (right?). You can easily match up the transactions that you have a paper receipt for. What about the web ones? You seem to have spent £11.98 on something at the Electronics Warehouse and you have not got a clue what it is. So you enter "11.98" (the quotes are essential here) and it finds the cached pages of the online shop and the email confirming the transaction. It is brilliant!

Calvin - Lifehacker

Lifehacker.com provides candid and democratic reviews of freeware, shareware, and open-source software to make your home/work/leisure life easier or just more entertaining. All this is liberally diced up with odd-ball articles on, for example, how to build your own portable air-conditioning unit, or how to make a bird-feeder out of a broken hard-drive! It's worth keeping up with the posts on there - you may well find something that will change your (second) life.

Dave - Personal Knowbase

Personal Knowbase is a free-form notes organiser. Articles can be written using full rich-text formatting (think Word rather than Notepad), then tagged with one or more keywords to help you quickly find them again later. I use it for storing reference material, project plans, useful links... Anything I might want to find again later really. There's a free trial available, and it comes with some examples to show you some of the different ways of using it.

Martin - Colour Scheme Designer 3

The Colour Scheme Designer can help you pick a colour scheme for a website, or generate a colour palette for anything you like. It's easy to use and allows you to extrapolate similar colours from your scheme.

Olga - TheBestDesigns.com

The best place to get inspiration and ideas about latest trends in webdesign is TheBestDesigns.com.

Mansour (Work Experience) - Google Docs

Google Docs provides a free online word processor and spreadsheet software. You can create new documents or upload existing documents from your computer for editing. The most useful feature is the ability to share documents with others, allowing simultaneous collaboration on a document. I used it to make shared revision notes with other students in my Computing class at school.

If you have your own favourite links, we'd love if it you would share them with us!

Project Spotlight: Paul Ridley Design Website Paul Ridley is both a photographer and a garden designer. He needed a beautiful looking website that to promote both these talants. He also needed to be able to maintain the website himself. We used CMSMS, a leading open source content management system, to deliver this. Read the case study

Alberon News: Mansour - Summer work experience

We've been very pleased that Mansour Ahmed has been able to spend the summer with us on work experience. After leaving d'Overbroeck's College in June, Mansour quickly settled in as part of the Alberon team and has made a strong contribution to a number of projects. In August he heard that he had got the grades he needed, so he's off to Cambridge in October where he's going to read Computer Science.

Alberon has close contacts with a number of local schools and colleges. We're always happy to talk about ways to build better links between education and business.

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