Building a boutique hotel’s site in a week - Cotommatae 1810, Hydra Greece

Another demanding project during the summer… What can we do?

Froso and Nikos came to us in late June with plans to build a new site for Cotommatae 1810, their brand new boutique hotel in Hydra, Greece. They had a temporary site set up for them but it was a mess. They wanted their site up and running for the Miaoulia 2012, the famous celebration in Hydra, which was just ten days away! 

It was Thursday (25th of June). We had to start from scratch and had to work really fast!

On Friday we looked around for new ideas, checked on the competition and did some brainstorming.

Working on a weekend was not an option… well, until then…

The templates and basic site map were designed during the last weekend of June. Cotommatae 1810's photos were great and helped us design a simple, clear website with a strong summer feeling. 

Decision-making was fast and Froso and Nikos were very confident about their choices! The templates were immediately approved and we started working and writing great html code on Monday afternoon!

Customization of our WebCtrl content management application was straightforward. We had to build a couple of new components using our beloved Jquery and other javascript frameworks for implementing some of the proposed functionality, but it was a piece of cake.

With everybody working on it, coding was almost finished on Thursday afternoon! In the meantime, back in the lab, the girls selected the photos to be used, edited and inserted all content (always minding their SEO) and took care of every little detail in constant cooperation with Froso and Nikos.

Some small debugging, a little fine-tuning and finally on Friday night voilà:  http://www.cotommatae.gr

 

AthensDesignApartments.com

A great little one page site for a couple of great design apartments for short or long term lease in the city of Athens.

Efi is a great architect. At some point she had the idea of renovating old apartments and turning them into luxurious, modern minimal design, fully equiped places for people visiting Athens. So she started Athens Design Apartments.

Currently she offers two great apartments right in the heart of Athens, near some of the most important sites in Athens like the Acropolis and it's new museum, the ancient temple of Olympian Zeus and the Panathenaic Stadium (Kalimarmaro). In walking distance from the Acropolis Metro station, they are very convenient for visiting Athens as a tourist or if you are on a business trip.

Efi came to us and asked for a quick, great looking, one page site with extensive use of the photos she provided.
And we came up with www.athensdesignapartments.com

RainToday.gr

Raintoday.gr is the simplest and very likely the most reliable weather prediction site on-line. Its main purpose is answering the simplest question of all: "Will it rain today in my area?".
All you have to do is enter your location and there you go!
A fast, reliable prediction of today's weather conditions in your district.

Raintoday.gr combines data gathered from different sources in real time, regarding the weather conditions and weather prediction in your area. It compares, analyzes and matches them using grouping and geolocation algorithms for deciding whether it will rain in a specific geographical section or not.

Try it for your location!

Avenir Group Portal

A new case study for Corporate Website development with Investor Relations portal integration. We designed and developed a higly functional, user friendly site, based upon the corporate identity’s specific needs which focuses on meeting the new trends worldwide for content optimization.

Avenir Group is listed in the Athens Stock Exchange and is active in the sectors of Fixed Odd Bets (land – based and online), Online Gaming & Gambling (online sportsbetting, live and RNG casino games) and Casinos on Board.

Quotting Avenir's Press Release:

"AVENIR Group presents its new website as a part of the new corporate identity which reflects a more contemporary and dynamic image. Furthermore, through state of the art web applications, the new website ensures maximum disclosure and transparency providing a totally friendly navigation environment.

The new website was designed and implemented by Umobit S.A. and is available since Thursday 05/05/2011, at the url: www.avenir.gr.

In consistency with the new brand name AVENIR, the new website reflects the ongoing modernization and development procedure of the group, fully adapted to both new business and technological developments.

The corporate identity and the latest developments of AVENIR Group are reflected from the very first page. On the Home page, visitors can be informed about the group’s latest news, the share price, the number and type of agents available and use of navigation tools (email page, print page, bookmarks, rss feed, email alert, etc.). There is a triple A (3A) Accessibility tool to help users with special needs and a file collector application that enhances navigation by collecting the files of one’s interest and gives the opportunity of massive storage to his computer. Through a totally friendly navigation environment, every visitor can have a complete update about the Group's strategy and vision, the principles of Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Governance which engage its corporate structure, Corporate Culture which inspires all employees, partners and it’s area of activities.

Detailed information is provided in the Investor Relations section in order to fully adapt the existing institutional framework and promote a two-way communication between the Group and the investment community as well as other interested parties and stakeholders. In this context, an analytical presentation of corporate governance structure, financial profile and financial statements, notes, annual financial reports, general meetings and a host of useful information is provided to investors through a user-friendly environment. There is a separate section with information regarding the company’s share through a dynamic comparative chart, stock performance calculators, historical price and dividend yield, economic calendar, and investor’s news.

The list of applications provided includes an interactive map of the Group’s geographical presence with detailed view of the Group’s agencies, RSS feeds for company news, investment news and new jobs available, a requesting form for printed material and subscription for automatic updates through email (email alert), a multimedia gallery and much more."

Intranet + Social Media = Intranet 2.0

Social media on the intranet (Intranet 2.0) is not a passing trend that will fade away.

Consider the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study:

• 87% of organizations have at least one intranet 2.0 (social media) tool
• 53% have intranet blogs (an 18% increase from last year’s survey)
• 52% have intranet discussion forums (a 13% increase from last year’s survey)
• 51% have intranet instant messaging (an 11% increase from last year’s survey)
• 49% have intranet wikis (a 4% increase from last year’s survey)

The impact on internal communications is potentially greater than the impact on IT, HR, and all of the other groups combined. Intranet social media is changing the way we communicate.

Social media has taken our personal lives by storm, but in the workplace, it’s often met with raised eyebrows, a little excitement, and a lot of caution. The perceived risks with adopting social media tools keep many organizations’ social media endeavors from ever getting off the ground. Luckily for you, knowing the right facts, case studies and other organizations’ success stories makes the task much less daunting.

Everybody loves to hate twitter

Everybody loves to hate twitter!
I know I do!
I have been using twitter for quite a while and have experienced more sorrow than happiness.
For the last couple of months I have been trying to get hastags and searches to work correctly without any success! My twits seem to get lost in outer space! But I keep trying! And I keep twitting!

Today I came across an article called Why Twitter Will Endure.

I think it describes very vividly why people get addicted to twitter.

SEO for videos: the new challenge

Google launched an automatic video captioning service for YouTube videos in an effort to make the visual clips more accessible to deaf people or anyone searching for videos online, but some see advantages for search engine optimization, too.

The machine-generated service will generate English-only captions initially on 13 partner channels. The service combines Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions.

The idea of video captioning is not new at YouTube, but the automatic feature could help to further optimize videos for people searching for content across engines and on YouTube. In theory, video scripts should become more optimized by the keywords in the captions. And while it's a great feature to make content more accessible for the deaf, other benefits exist for marketers.

Source: www.mediapost.com