Seahorse Design is the romanian web design company of freelancer coder and designer, Frank O'Connor.
http://www.transylvaniacricketclub.ro
The Transylvania Cricket Club is a club with a mission: to bring cricket to Romania. The club invites teams from around the world to play tournaments in Bucharest. Seahorse Design were commissioned to create a site that reflects the dynamism of their enterprise. We use a Wordpress back end and designed a new template as well as a splash page and a unique sidebar menu.
Popularity: 52% [?]
Sportsmen Against Hunger takes antlerless deer killed by hunters, pays for the processing, and distributes the meat to the needy across South Dakota. Seahorse Design was commissioned to produce a simple, friendly, elegant and usable site for the cause.
Popularity: 100% [?]
We have made yet another Wordpress adaption for the official site of the National Romanian Madrigal Choir. It is a dual language site, featuring clips of the choir from times past, photos, a discography and regular news updates. The site is easy to maintain and update and highly search engine friendly.
The National Chamber Choir ‘Madrigal’ of Romania is one of the most celebrated and highly thought of choral ensembles, both in Romania and throughout the world. Their fame is due to their unique singing artistry - an experience testified to by Lord Yehudi Menuhin and Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, among others, in the ‘Golden Book’, a guest book begun in the 1960’s to accommodate the many international accolades and endorsements the choir has received, and replicated on the new site.
Popularity: 98% [?]
We’ve recently transferred the S.E.P.E site to a new home on a Wordpress application. The old site was completely styled and coded by us, by hand, including all of the administration and news upload facilities. While that was fine at the time, and worked well, our experience working with Wordpress sites has lead us to believe that Wordpress is probably the best CMS going out there in terms of SEO, usability and stability. And now we have finally got around to making the upgrade.
Because the old site was powered by a MySQL database, the switch over was achieved with a minimum of fuss. We kept a lot of elements from the old design, which is one that we are particularly proud of. But we also ported this design into a new template which adds more usability and simplicity to the overall site experience. All the old features, including the online donations facility and the dual language (English/Spanish) have been successfully duplicated too.
We’re very happy with the results and look forward to developing new plugins and features for the site in the future.
Popularity: 100% [?]
The owners of Medieval Tours approached Seahorse Design and said they were having problems with people visiting their old site. We suggested a Wordpress solution, because, when done properly, a Wordpress site can solve all of your SEO problems at a stroke. On top of this it has all the advantages of a sophisticated user logging system and the potential to be updated and changed very easily. Once the system was chosen, we consulted with Medieval Tours on developing and modifying a theme and creating a new menu structure and the site pages. The result is still a work in progress and we are full of ideas for future changes, but the time was right to go live, so we did.
Popularity: 98% [?]
http://www.seahorse-design.com/california_constanta/
When Tania Budi and Tara Anderson approached Seahorse Design and said they needed their web site and gallery created from conception to operation in just 2 days, we said sure, absolutely. This is the result - a complete brochure site, with images, graphics and a Javascript gallery all up and running, including the hosting and the domain name, which we also consulted on and sorted out. If you want a 2 day site like this one, just ask.
Popularity: 99% [?]
The Vivid site is really coming along in leaps and bounds now, with its new look front page, clock and streaming media additions. There’s more in the pipeline too, including new syndication feeds for weather and the latest happenings in downtown Bucharest.
In the last month I have also done a lot of Joomla customisation work, and designed an application that feeds Wordpress posts from any blog into a static XHTML site.
And I have finally got around to making something I always wanted to make - a proper PHP and MySQL class for handling all kinds of routine interactive site work, such as logging in, administration, forms and listings - the kind of stuff that everyone wants, but often involves a lot of repeat work. With this new code, I should be able to turn around fully interactive applications at a greatly increased speed, which is good news, because that’s how everyone wants it these days.
Popularity: 100% [?]
It’s been a while, I know, but then we’ve been busy. Some of our recent work has focused on an overhaul of the visual design of the Vivid Romania web site. I’ve worked on the logo, colors and the front page in order to highlight the most recent story as well as the latest entry into the site’s busy gallery section.
Other work includes:
As well as this, we’ve won a number of exciting contracts which we’re rushing to complete. Plus one long-standing piece of work is ready to go live any day soon.
The weather in Bucharest has broken through the thirties now, but recent renovations to our building mean that it remains relatively cool indoors. This is good news for our new Apple iMac G5 which we’ve bought to increase our productivity speed and power. It’s one of the latest generation Macs, super fast and great to use. I’m having a lot of fun with it, discovering new widgets, downloads and shareware.
Popularity: 98% [?]
Two recent jobs bear mentioning. In one day, I made a simple template for a brochure site about a car phone kit. The site owner required a search engine ready template that made it simple for him to fill in his own gaps using XHTML.
Half a day was required for me to style a basic menu with a Windows Vista look for a site that sells translation software, and to integrate the result with that site’s template. When I get the time, I might write up an article on how that one was done.
My main assignment currently is a major integration of a pre-existing site into a Joomla CMS and template. More on that when it’s completed.
Popularity: 100% [?]
The Bucharest Metro System does not lend itself easily to the art of photography. In fact, it only barely lends itself to the art of travel. For me, and I suspect for many of the city’s inhabitants, the Metro system is a place to get in and out of as fast as possible.
None of this has stopped Wouter Biesterbos, a diplomat at the Dutch Embassy, from trying to photograph the system and then selling on his images in aid of Aras a Romanian NGO. Clearly, Dutch and Romanian relations are in a happy and peaceful lull right now.
The results are impressive. They show the system in a new light, literally, as the lighting in the images is their chief strength. I have set up a one page gallery of some of Mr. Biesterbos’ work for Vivid magazine. My main contribution in this respect is to crop the work into a cinematic form, to add drama to the pictures.
For more on the Metro, here’s one from the archives.
Popularity: 100% [?]
