Bluelime News
Working with Kevin from Landsea Bus last week , we successfully launched a new website for them by converting their new design into WordPress Templates. While walking through the website and demonstrating WordPress’s ability, Kevin mentioned their “Stuff the Bus” event. Every year the folks at Landsea Tour park their tour bus at different locations around town and the public is invited to come and “Stuff it” with blankets and warm clothing which will be donated to the St. James Community Service Society.
This year’s charity event promises to be even bigger and better with The Town Pants at Richards on Richards December 11th. Take a look at the poster for more info.
According to the March 11th 2008 homeless count, there are 2592 homeless people in Vancouver. If you have a spare jacket or blanket please come by one to one of their location and give generously.
Here are the full charity event details.
Every four years the Province of British Columbia assembles a team of athletes, coaches, managers and mission staff to represent the province at Canada’s premiere multi-sport events – the Canada Winter Games and Canada Summer Games. They represent the best in BC and are known as Team BC. The Team BC program is more than British Columbia’s best; it is also about building excellence. For some athletes, the Canada Games are a goal along the way to what they hope will be success in sport at major multi-sport Games including Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The previous Team BC website lacked in visual appeal, was quite difficult to navigate and consisted of old-style code which made for difficult maintenance. Working in collaboration with Miin from the Ascent Group we developed a site map, re-organized all of the content and created two new websites. Users wishing to know more about Team BC can use the main Team BC website while users wishing to follow a certain event or look at past results, can navigate to the Game Site.
We hope that during the Canadian Summer Games 2009, these websites will be a great resource to all of the Team BC members and wish them best of luck.
Bluelime has helped The Crisis Centre with their websites for years, including maintaining the Youth in BC site. Until recently the latter was easier said than done because the site was, well, a bit of a tangled mess under the hood. Little changes took longer than you might expect because of old-style coding. To the viewers eyes, it was visually overwhelming and not very user friendly. Given the number of resources offered on the site, and especially the potential state of crisis that viewers may be experiencing, ease of finding information and ease of maintenance are crucial.
Recently we designed a new site incorporating Youth in BC’s new branding and built it with WordPress so that staff can do most of the maintenance themselves. They’ve been receiving positive feedback from their audience, including:
The site is way better than the old one. Lots more info on so many things now.
…Which was music to my ears. It’s actually the same information, just easier to find. Mission accomplished :-)
If you were one of the lucky ones who saw the highly acclaimed play “The Fever” earlier this year at the Beaumont you’ll be happy to hear that another Twenty Something Theatre production is now coming to theatres. SubUrbia by Eric Bogosian, produced and directed by Sabrina Evertt, is the story of a group of suburban twenty-year olds who gather outside their local convenience store to welcome home an old friend who is returning after a successful national tour with his rock band. His arrival in a limousine with entourage in tow precipitates an all night whirlwind of drinking, sex & violence.
This new production also comes with a new website for the Theatre company. Working with Andrew Lewis, a very clean, elegant design was put together and built using WordPress allowing Sabrina to make changes and updates as needed.
If theatre is of interest to you, be sure to catch Suburbia from August 19 – August 31, 2008 at the Playwrights Theatre Centre on Granville Island.
Tickets are available at the door, at Ticket Tonight or by calling 604-684-2787.
A few months ago we updated our portfolio with our latest project, UBC Vault. This website was a collaborative effort and we mistakenly credited the logo design to Johnny Kuan, when in fact the creative team at Pacey + Pacey Design were responsible for the UBC Library’s branding.
So apologies are in order!
And just to recap, here are the names of everyone involved in this project:
Pacey + Pacey – Branding/log
Johnny Kuan – Web Design
Christine Rondeau (me) – HTML/CSS
Joseph Lo and Ben Keen – PHP Programming
Miin Lim and Angelia Darnbrough – Consultation
And of course the team at UBC were extensively involved in testing, copywriting, etc….
When I first started my business 5 years ago, I was always surprised to hear myself say “not at all, I’m a workaholic” when asked if I found it distracting to work at home. I always considered myself to be very lucky and grateful that I could stay focused and motivated even though, cooking, TV and laundry were there to tempt me. And I guess that’s what allowed me to build a successful business. By “not being distracted” and thus remaining focused, I managed to work hard, do lots of business development, networked and gained a good number of clients.
This year has been fantastic so far, but I’m finding myself in a conundrum; I’m friggin exhausted! I’ve been working so hard, I’ve forgotten to take the time to cook, watch TV and do the laundry… Ok, watching TV is not that big of a deal, considering the rubbish that’s on, but on average, I’m working between 55 to 70 hours a week and I’m burning out.
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I’ve been swamped lately and frantically trying to stay afloat. As a result blog postings have been few and far between and I apologize. I’m still working like a fiend trying to catch up, but I think that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
As our company grows we’ve managed to secure bigger and bigger clients. Earlier this year, we’ve not only signed on to work on a government project, but four. It’s been very exciting to work on large scale projects that require much more planning and strategizing.
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The UBCVault.ca website won GOLD award for e-Innovation from the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education. The UBCVault newsletter, eVault also won the Bronze Award for Best Newsletter.
Congratulations to the entire team at UBC for making this website a great success.
One of my New Year’s resolution this year was to deepen my yoga practice and integrate yoga philosophy in my daily activities. I was already practicing 5 times a week, so I’ve now increased to 6 and sometimes 7, I attend workshops whenever I can with visiting teachers and went to my first yoga retreat a few weeks ago. I feel better than ever, but I still haven’t found an way to involve yoga in my Web work.
Ideally my goal would be to develop and create sites dedicated to yoga. I’ve had the pleasure to work with Barbara from Bluecitrus for many years now. When I first met her, she had just launched Chakravibe, an e-commerce website selling yoga jewelery based on the chakra colours. Built using OS-Commerce platform, the website functioned very well, but was difficult to update and maintain and the code was a complete nightmare to decipher. When Barbara approached me earlier this year and asked me to help her move the static pages to WordPress, I decided that if I wanted to get involved in the yoga community, this was a great first move.
Joseph and Ben took responsibility of the OS-Commerce component and moved everything to a sub-folder. I took care of re-creating the design using up-to-date HTML/CSS and removed all of the tables and set up the WordPress templates. I doubt that many people have noticed that the website has changed. Except for a few pixel adjustments here and there and the changes in url, the website is identical. We’ve also added a blog allowing Barbara and Teresa, to write posts and tell us what’s new. So far the results have been very positive. Barbara is very pleased that she can update the content and post new images and Teresa has been writing great posts.
This year’s Northern Voice was my second. I thoroughly enjoyed both events and look forward to next year. I suspect that 2010 will prove to be a bit problematic due to another event happening at that time of year but, hey, that’s still a long way away.
Following last year’s conference I told all of my clients who were blogging that they needed to go next year. So as soon as NV08 was announced, I sent them all an email and encouraged them to register. I think that I sent the email to about a dozen or so of my clients. Only one came, Heidi, which is a shame, but a start. I got the chance to speak to her about the event and I think that she enjoyed it thoroughly and, like me, left the event with lots of ideas.
Every year the organizers try to do something different and this year the Internet Bootcamp was on offer during the first day. I think that of all the talks that were given, this session was the most valuable for bloggers who are just dipping their toes in the blogosphere. As an educator Heidi is using the Web and social media to reach out to kids and teachers and help create a better educational systems. Heidi is already pretty tech savvy and has been blogging for a while, but these sessions were hopefully able to answers some of her questions.
I do hope that this session will return next year and encourage would-be bloggers to attend NV09.
See you next year.