A few years ago I produced a Volumetric Calculator using some basic JavaScript for Scarlet Couriers, a Reading based courier company. More recently I worked on the website for APC Overnight who act as a hub for Scarlet and other courier companies around the UK where a slightly revamped version of the calculator was used on their site. I was very chuffed to see it got a rave review from the Midlands Business News website.

The website for Financial Management for Business – an innovative business finance foundation course – went live this afternoon. This is to reinforce the publication next Monday of the book that accompanies the course.

The FMFB course is a unique way of mastering the foundations of financial management. Through a series of interactive simulations and online self-tests, participants develop an intuitive understanding of financial management and new business skills that can be immediately applied in the workplace.

Not a major re-design at first glance (and nothing that affects this blog) but making the menu fixed to the bottom of the browser window on the main site involved making a lot of changes. The page will disappear under the menu if the page is long enough to scroll under a background PNG with graduated transparency.

In order for this not to be broken in IE6 I’ve got a conditional stylesheet that takes away the PNG and stops the menu being fixed. I tried all of the various PNG fixes, but having a combination of a fixed element and a PNG background image stopped the links working. Yet another of IE6’s bizarre little ways. Won’t it be good when it finally goes the way of all old browsers.

While I was doing this I took the opportunity to update the folder structure which had grown a bit unwieldy over the years. Checking all the links on the site – nearly 40,000 – and then working out the best way to do 301 redirects in the .htaccess file was fun. Thanks go to Michael Fesser for advice on the use of RedirectMatch and regular expressions.

ReedDesign has just finished a complete redesign of the website of award winning composer Robert Hartshorne who goes under the scholarly business sobriquet of ECG – Ex Cantibus Gaudium – Enjoyment Through Melody. The site includes 60 audio and nearly 100 video clips that show off Robert’s great musical talent, including sections on Thomas and Friends and Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain.

I saw this notice in the window of an Internet shop in Clapham this morning!

I thought I’d add a panorama of the ReedDesign office so you can all see where all that creativity happens.

My laptop still has that abomination Vista installed as the postal strike seems to have held up the delivery of the Windows 7 upgrade, which I can’t wait to get my hands on.

The kite on the wall is a carp which I’ve been told in Chinese sounds like profit so hopefully it will give me good luck in business.

I’ve taken the opportunity of a couple of quiet days to update some of the older panoramas on my website. I’ve used the latest beta version of Pano2VR and decided to only go with Flash panoramas and ditch the Java and Quicktime versions completely. All of the updates used a much higher resolution image and will only be compatible with Flash 9 and upwards – but as the uptake of Flash 9 and now version 10 seems to be fairly universal I don’t think this will be much of a problem.

ReedDesign has just completed a series of 360° panoramas for Mill Hill and Belmont Schools. The panoramas include interiors of the Chapel, Favell Building and 6th Form Common Room as well as some exterior views of the grounds.

The panoramas were shot on a Nikon D300 with a 10.5mm fisheye lens and a KingPano panoramic head. They were stitched using PTGui and converted into Flash panoramas using Pano2VR.

The latest ReedDesign website went live today. It’s a total re-design for the Socialist International Women – nearly 300 pages in three languages.

Socialist International Women is the international organisation of the women’s organisations of the socialist, social democratic and labour parties affiliated to the Socialist International.

I’ve added a PDF showing Windows Alt codes for some of the more frequently used characters to my HTML Character Entities page.

Let me know if you find this useful.