September was a hugely busy month on two main fronts and saw the relaunch of a hugely revamped Hollyford Track website. Optimised to take advantage of new interactive technologies, the new look website (intricate design by John from UMC) is bursting with both emotive and informative media assets that will have everyone dying to book a ticket and enjoy their own uniquely New Zealand outdoors experience.
The biggest challenge (from a web developers point of view) were the full-screen backgrounds that the client wanted and organising them in such a way that they don’t impact on the scan-ability and readability of the main page text. As always New Zealand is a wonderful subject matter to work with and exposure to such gorgeous imagery makes me want to take a holiday – lol.
Also this month I have been working on a Joomla multiple website setup – where multiple websites feed off the same database. As this is not what the Joomla/Virtuemart system was designed for it becomes quite tricky and a lot of the development was based on conceptual ideas combined with knowledge of the current schema. The work isn’t quite finished yet but I am pleased to report that so far so good 
The client requires the ability to have one central editing area for articles, news and products and for those changes to be distributed out to four differently themed websites (and to be able to pick and choose which sites get what content and to what level of detail they are displayed). Once completed I will add a tutorial to the Tutorials section for all of those developers looking to setup a similar system.
