Social Disease is a brand new publishing company that was established by Heidi James as an antidote to publishers who slavishly pander to so-called market forces and therefore reject great books as a corollary. Social Disease began as a monthly Literary Mini-zine, publishing incredible short stories. Their aim is to publish extraordinary literature regardless of its pedigree or ‘niche’ in the market, or indeed lack of.

They needed a simple but effective website that would communicate the company ethos, have information on where to buy books by featured authors and also allow additional information to be easily added in the near future. After looking at several solutions, including a 'from scratch' HTML build, Tube Media discovered the editable 'Romulus' template from 'Binary Moon' which was a selectable template from the WordPress Blog system.

This solution not only allows the standard 'blogging', but also allows custom pages to be set-up, giving you all the features of a very expensive bespoke content management solution in a free package. The wonders of technical advancement, eh? It also allows the site to be subscribed to RSS feeds from any syndicating website, but also allows interested parties to subscribe to the site's own RSS feed. This means that customers can have updates from Social Disease sent straight to their desktop.
After trying several different header designs (some of which are displayed below to show the variety of what is possible) and exploring the configuration capabilities, we discovered that the WordPress platform was a superb solution for anyone wanting a simple, easily editable website with the only compromise being the limitations of visual design configuration. You can change the template colours, within a limited range of pre-configured options, and also upload your own custom header to personalise the site. This is something that very few hosted blogs provide, although hosting your own blog engine does give you the full range of stylesheet customisation.

Using this system we were able to deliver a top-quality website within the client's budget, providing excellent value for money, with the total turnaround time being less than a week!

Design Evolution…
We started with something fairly simple to start with…

Then we tried something a bit more edgey, with a clear reference to the website purpose…

The next design was to try something more 'punky', with the header taking design cues from relevant bands, authors, books, photos, fashion and several other sources…

In the end we settled on the simpler, more elegant header that is now visible on the Social Disease Website.

We've just finished a project for Satin Wedding Videography, who contacted me after doing a wedding with my Wife, who has her own Wedding photography business. They needed a complete overhaul to achieve the following for their business:

• Improve the perception of the company
• Display examples of thier work
• Allow payments to be taken online
• Improve usability for their users
• Allow regular updates on activity
• Improve search engine performance

They were operating to a tight budget, having been very disappointed with the previous site, so it required innovative use of the free technology available to achieve their objectives.

The first task was to create a design that worked with their new brand identitiy, which required several different designs to be created before a favourite emerged. We chose this scheme because of the way in which the background photo framed the video content, with colours driven by the branding and the fact that the majority of their website users are women.

To provide the streaming video we used a free service called 'YouTube', which allows videos to be uploaded up to 100Mb in size or 10-minutes in length. This was sufficient for the 'showreel' that appears on the ome page, plus several other showreels and video testimonials that appear throughout the site.

Here's an example of a video from YouTube, so you can see the quality which is optimised for the web. If your connection is slow, click the pause button and leave the video to fully buffer before clicking play again:

To improve usability a top-level navigation was added throughout the site, with clear signposting at the base of each page that users can follow through the site, before eventually arriving at the contact page. Links were given consistent colours, with appropriate title and alt tags for accessibility.

Here's an example of the signposting at the base of each page…

To allow the Satin Weddings team to update information about their company throughout the year, we introduced them to blogging, setting up a free blog on the Blogger system so they could try it out at no cost, and therefore no investment apart from their time. Using this blog allows Satin to upload stories, pictures and any further wedding videos they wish to show to their customers, without having to invest in a bespoke dynamic site, or pay for HTML changes.

Finally, to improve their performance on search engines we optimised their metadata, ensuring that appropriate title, description and tags were added to each page. By blogging about their work and participating in discussion on other blogs they are already ranked on Google, with their position being monitored to ensure it improves over time.

To further improve their profile they've been added to the top weddning planning portals, ensuring that they already appear on the first page of Google with some common search terms relating to their services.

Read Sam and Tina's testimonial…