After the brand was in place, we began work on the online store for the new business.  With a host of categories ranging from vitamins to PDA’s it was essential to ensure that navigation and user journeys were clear, intuitive and prepped for up selling.  The site features a range of tools including newsletter campaign managers, voucher offers and a detailed stock and customer control system.

To market ‘SHED’, we designed and printed branded business cards and promotional materials. Debug Design and Shed Lifestyle look forward to working together for the foreseeable future, growing and strengthening the ‘SHED’ brand through strategic brand positioning, targeted marketing and PR.

“Debug’s creative design skill is unrivaled. Ian and Katie’s creative ability was able to grasp my required brand concept, from just 1 hour of my random monologue, of what I required my business image to be. They took all the points I required, dissected them, and then merged them all back together to fit the vision I had of the Brand SHED Lifestyle. I was completely impressed with the outcome after only one design draft.

The design and quality of my business cards and advertising flyers completely impressed me too, and my potential customers often expressed their positive opinions on a countless number of occasions.

Debug have also worked extremely hard to merge the brand of SHED into the website shop store, which on occasions was not easy, while utilising the latest CSS web script with the multi functional and much praised Magento e-commerce platform. Even though some area’s proved extremely difficult to merge together, due to stepping into slightly uncharted waters, Debug have endeavored and succeeded to put things right when they occurred.

I’d happily say Debug have worked above and beyond the call of duty (and contract) and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to any existing or potential business that would need a service such as theirs.. In fact, I already have!!

Cheers Guys!”

Jamie White, Founder, SHED Lifestyle

SHED Lifestyle – The ultimate source for Men’s Health and Male Grooming products.

Free Cinema & Theatre Tickets for Local Shoppers

In a time of uncertainty, local residents of Felixstowe are asked to shop local for great offers on cinema and theatre tickets at the Palace Cinema and the Spa Pavilion.

Wandering the streets of Felixstowe it’s nice to see such a diverse collection of businesses not only on the high street but all around the town.   This wealth of shops have meant that many of the residents can get what they want, when they want, without having to journey to the huge superstores or the larger towns.  However, with the current slow down everyone is feeling the pinch and so in a move to keep this wealth and diversity in Felixstowe residents and businesses have come together to create ‘Felixstowe Together’, a shop local campaign aiming to support the town’s businesses and give residents offers on cinema and theatre tickets.

Launching this July and spearheaded by The Flyer and Debug Design; residents will be able to gain vouchers for every £10 spent in participating shops.  These vouchers can then be exchanged for free child tickets, buy one get one free offers and even free mid week tickets (in conjunction with a website code).

To get it off to a flying start, local residents will be entitled to special discounts if they sign up on the website www.felixstowetogether.com which will enter them into a monthly prize draw, email them whenever there is any last minute deals, and inform, them of additional shops joining the campaign.

If the project is successful it is hoped that the vouchers will be extended giving residents percentage discounts on an increasing range of other products and services from haircuts to MOTs.

Keep an eye out on the Triangle on the 11th July where the public launch will have bags for life on offer and further details on the project.

Felixstowe Together couldn’t have been more true as the companies involved are giving their time and services for free and raising money for additional help with the project. The project has the full support of the Felixstowe chamber of trade and commerce with Chairman Peter Dawes saying “Felixstowe has an excellent range of small shops and businesses, but during this time they might finding it increasingly difficult to compete with supermarkets and other out-of-town shops.  We at the Felixstowe Chamber of Commerce want to support and encourage people to use the businesses and shops in Felixstowe not only to help the local economy but keep people in local employment ”

Councillor John Goodwin said “To live in Suffolk is to live in the best County in the whole country, to live in the

Felixstowe area has to be the icing on the cake. Felixstowe is still a real community where people know your name and speak you in the street, a place where we can get virtually everything we need from our local shops and businesses. This is why Angel and I are prepared to give this scheme our wholehearted support, any thing to keep

Felixstowe the vibrant and special place that it so clearly is. We all know the slogan, “use it or lose it”, now more than ever is the time to support our own, buy British if at all possible and buy it in the Felixstowe area.”

If you would like to be involved as a business or volunteer please contact Ian Garstang and Adrian Bradshaw by email at support@felixstowetogether.com and together we can support Felixstowe whilst enjoying its range of amenities.

With this in mind we have created a list of 5 open source alternatives to software needed to tinker with images, code and documents.

Aptana Studio instead of Dreamweaver
http://www.aptana.com/studio
Aptana Studio is a HTML and CSS design suite. It is also used by programmers who write in PHP, Ruby and others. It works very similarly to Dreamweaver in that it has both a design and code view, has syntax highlighting, comes with code snippets, and will also FTP files to your website for you. If you have used Dreamweaver in the past then Aptana would feel very familiar to you, with a few nice surprises (especially for those AJAX lovers out there).

GIMP instead of Photoshop
http://www.gimp.org/
GIMP is almost a ‘clone’ of Photoshop. It works in very similar way with its layers, selections, filters and painting tools. It can even read and write in Photoshop format, making it ultra compatible with your Photoshop using colleagues or clients. The software doesn’t feel quite as polished as Photoshop does, and its text manipulation is a little behind Photoshop’s. But, if you’re like the majority of people who use Photoshop to resize their images, reduce the colours, and maybe add the odd special effect to add a little extra to your websites, then the GIMP is definitely something you should try!

Inkscape instead of Illustrator
http://www.inkscape.org/
Inkscape is a vector drawing programs with features similar to that of Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. It has a very large feature set, including n-sided object creation, text effects, raster images, gradients, layers, opacity and paths. It can read and write in many formats, including XML, SVG and complies with W3C standards. It can also read AI and SVG files exported from Illustrator. A fine and free alternative.

OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office
http://www.openoffice.org/
Open Office.org (or OOo for short) is a direct replacement for Microsoft’s Office suite (excluding Outlook). It is a very mature project and they have very recently released version 3.1.0. You can use replacements for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. OOo can also read and write in any of the native file formats, as well as a few others (like PDF) which older versions of Office can’t. Being a Linux man myself in a predominantly Windows environment, I find OOo a life saver. This one comes highly recommended.

Mozilla Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express/Webmail
http://www.mozillamessaging.com
Mozilla Thunderbird is a feature packed mail program which allows you to organise, customise and secure your mails.  Each mail can be tagged, searched, secured and with so many personalisation options you can make it your own in now time.  And most importantly, its free.

The website features a bespoke content management system built to allow simple and easy updates to cruise, lecturer and ship information.  The website was coded in PHP and CSS with modal windows. The modal window has many advantages; when a modal window contains a smaller element, the user doesn’t need to load an entirely new page just to access it, the modal windows allows them to view the content overlaid on their current page, improving the usability of the website. Having to load pages over and over will annoy most users, so avoiding that is definitely a good thing. Modal windows also allow you to save space by getting rid of large elements that don’t need to be on the main page.

Debug Design have just launched a brand new website for the Adastral Park Gym in Martlesham.

With a refurbishment, new equipment and additional facilities it was time to re-vamp the website. The new site features a PHP based online booking system with AJAX usability components.  The online booking will make it much simpler for members to reserve their session times and news pages aim to bring in new members.

The custom made CMS (Content Management System) allows the team at Adastral Park Leisure and Sports to create new facilities (ie: squash court, tennis court), add recurring facilities, cater for clubs and communicate with all of its members with the newsletter functionality.

These include:

-  SEO Freindly URL’s
-  Google Search Suggest for the search box
-  Automatically updated share price (as they are listed on the UK stock market)
-  User friendly AJAX Highslide contact forms
-  Integrated Google Maps
-  One Click Lightbox Galleries
-  CSS Print Styles
-  Custom CMS system

Panther Securities are enjoying the current slow down in the market by increasing their portfolio of properties ready for the revival next year.

Their primary objective is to maximise long-term return for our shareholders by stable growth in net asset value and dividend per share, from a consistent and sustainable rental income stream.

To achieve these goals they work alongside their tenants for their mutual benefit.

Over the next few years they will continue to expand their investment portfolio by uncovering commercial opportunities which offer a high yielding return on our investment, or the reasonable expectation for such a return.

This small but highly experienced management team are able to evaluate opportunities quickly and efficiently and so expect alot more from them in the future.

Visit their site at http://www.panthersecurities.co.uk

“We were very impressed with Debug Design, whom understood our requirements perfectly, and then expertly guided us through the design process.  Their help and guidance was invaluable as we were unclear on how best to position our web presence, especially as we had no formal corporate identity, in terms of logo and design.  We now have the perfect looking professional website in terms of functionality, and utilised the logo developed by Debug design (for the website) on our accounts and corporate stationery, as such I would have no doubts in recommending them.”

Simon Peters
Finance Director
Panther Securities PLC

Richard Deyn’s Easy Guitar method can teach you to play in only 4 weeks… and thats not constant practice all day everyday, thats 30mins per day!!!

Debug Design has created an amazing new website which brings together, audio, visual, technology, flash, CSS and php and much more to aid budding guitarists on their journey.

Email sign ups get access to even more content which includes articles and more helpful videos.

Paid members get access to an online journal which can be personalised and has advanced code which allows you to open videos and audio tracks whilst learning…

Its amazing! even if we do say so ourselves!

This CSS/XHTML coded site is a bright, colourful and child friendly website to help advertise the new kids adventure playground in Essex…

So visit www.wildnwacky.co.uk to listen to the sounds of the jungle and check our the concept art for the new climbing frames and activity centres…

They didn’t have anything like that in our day…

UPDATE: Also added to this project was the addition of business cards, flyers, posters, menus and party invites… Look out for this new attraction summer 2009**

Debug has been producing quality photography some some time now but this has always been conducted in the studio of our partner company.

With our new ‘no frills’ product photography studio we can now offer another solution to your photography needs.

Along with our affordable online store option we can now take your selected stock, spend the day on the studio taking the necessary photos before giving them to our staff for post production work.
Once completed these images can be used for your online store, website or print project.So take advantage of our new introductory offers today!

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