Wrecclesham Conservation Group

Although thriving on social media, Wrecclesham Conservation Group needed a website to consolidate its online identity and provide a permanent access route for its busy events calendar. As pro bono work, we unashamedly repurposed substantial elements from a now-defunct client website, but added lots of new functionality specific to the needs of the group. In particular we incorporated the facility for cataloguing details of wildlife, for example this list of locally found moth species.

Furthermore, Kourou's file management facility was able to be customised to be the administrative interface for the archive website underpinning photo gallery delivery on the main site at launch – with the prospect of further sophistication being added in the future to reflect the group's interests in both local ecology and history. This kind of flexibility is simply not possible with the "instant website creators" that are so popular, but lead the unwary into technological dead-ends.

Charlotte Lade

Charlotte Lade is probably the top female professional football freestyler in the world, and needed her own "quick-win" website to support her promotion company's latest publicity drive, and based on her existing artwork.

Charlotte's site was the first of our Kourou websites to employ HTML5 and mobile responsive design, to ensure best compatibility and customer reach on devices such as smartphones and tablets as well as desktop. Customers of all our future developments will be encouraged to embrace similar technology to maximise the potential of their websites.

We're operating from a new server

Although Kourou can be deployed on most modern PHP-based web-hosting, for a one-stop solution and guaranteed compatibility, most of our clients opt to use Goznet Systems managed hosting solutions. With our own and our clients' needs increasing daily, and facing the seemingly never-ending menace of cyber-security issues like Shellshock, we recently migrated to a shiny new server which is proving significantly easier to maintain as well as being much more responsive.

Better for us, better for our clients, better for their clients!

Highshot Events Children's Parties

By way of keeping up to date with more recent developments (a new member of the family has inevitably meant considerably less time and energy to put into web stuff!), here is Highshot Events Children's Parties, promoting the latest venture from our long-time friends at Highshot Events whose own website was an early Kourou implementation.

It's a technically fairly simple site but the design brief was to be fun and child-friendly whilst not actively childish, so we've incorporated animation and a few other eye-catching features along the way.

eMersion Language

Just a simple "quick win" site for an existing client promoting her new English/French tutoring business, eMersion Language.

That's really pretty much all there is to it, but it's exactly what the client wanted, and there are still some useful custom features such as an event calendar.

Danny Bowen Airbrushing

A simple but stylish website to promote Danny Bowen Airbrushing.

Artists invariably want their websites to look better than great, and that's no bad thing. We think we've delivered, with the help of Kourou and jQuery.

Impulse Engineering

Over a year in the making but worth the wait, the new Impulse Engineering website is finally here! It is perhaps our most "corporate" website yet, yet it still maintains the personality and approachability of the company and its staff.

In common with several of our more recent developments, this site makes extensive use of the popular de-facto standard jQuery scripting framework to provide attractive visual interactions.

The Garden Consultancy

An attractive little website overhaul for Alistair McVean's landscape garden design business The Garden Consultancy.

Full-window background images seem to be all the rage but can be heavy on resources, but we've always been conscious of those without the latest and greatest computers and/or internet connections, and think we got it about right with the help of Kourou and jQuery.

From the award-winning...

In related news, one of our sites has won an award! FreeBibleimages is a Christian website sharing specially commissioned photographs depicting stories from the Bible, and also licensing some illustrated stories. Goznet Systems, the creators of Kourou, were approached to implement the website after the success of the Farnham Foodbank site. Anyway, FreeBibleimages walked away the winner in the People's Choice category at the 2012 Christian New Media Awards and Conference, and received this fine lump of Perspex to show for it - the icing on the cake after the buzz generated by the nomination alone!

In accepting the award, FreeBibleimages' Paul Thompson dedicated it to the late Tony Staite, one of the founder members, without whose vision and financial generosity the project might never have got off the ground.

Armadillo Pets

A brand new website published today, for a brand new business! Armadillo Pets offer pet-sitting, walking, visiting and other furry-friend related services in Farnham, Surrey and the surrounding area.

The website is implemented in Kourou, with various customisations, based upon a "960-pixel" concept from third-party business Designer Mate. The jQuery and Prototype libraries are used to help power some of the more sophisticated user interaction. The client is happy that the finished website is the most attractive of any local competitors.

All quiet on the western front as far as new sites are concerned - or is it? In fact there are a few Kourou powered sites bubbling away getting very close to release, so watch this space over the next few weeks to see how they worked out!

Zonta Club of Guildford

The Zonta Club of Guildford is a local branch of Zonta, a global organisation of executives and professionals working together to advance the status of women worldwide through service and advocacy.

The website is an intentionally minimalist Kourou design, with a few elements subtly animated with Flash, and using a database-driven calendar to promote future events for the club.

Remote FTP publishing

Announcing the latest new feature in Kourou: remote FTP publishing!

Some customers' pre-existing webspace is very basic, not supporting "advanced" features like PHP, Perl etc that modern websites increasingly need to work efficiently. So we are pleased to announce that Goznet Systems' Kourou content management platform now supports remote FTP publishing.

Basically this means that you can have a fully content-managed Kourou-based website even if your webspace doesn't directly support it. You simply maintain your website at a special private address, and then click Remote publish in the Kourou toolbar to send the updates to your actual website via FTP.

There are a few limitations still. In particular this does mean your website should not rely on any special dynamic functions like searching or contact forms, but even so, this new feature opens the realm of possibilities enabled by Kourou to even the most simple webspace. Features like Google Maps, Flash and so on are all potentially supported, so there is still plenty of scope for highly interactive websites!

Novelty/complexity model

This isn't quite so obviously Kourou, but it's a little web application for AJP Consulting going live any time now that employs some of the modular elements of it. This is why we call Kourou a content management platform, rather than system - it's a loose collection of technology that can come together in many forms, from individual bits of handy functionality able to be dropped in to independently managed websites, to complete ground-up site designs.

The web application collects a number of responses about a project from the registered user, which are then analysed to determine the novelty and complexity of the project, to recommend further reading, and to generate a reference PDF containing all of the above in a handy print-off-and-keep format.

In this case, the quickform element of Kourou is used in the admin interface, significantly accelerating what could otherwise have been a very laborious and error-prone development process for something not directly visible to the visiting users.

Search rankings

Hey, it's surely at least a little bit exciting to see that this new blog is doing great in the search rankings! At the time of writing, we're #9 on Google worldwide, #1 on Google UK, #5 on Bing and #1 on Ask Jeeves UK. That's when searching for kourou as a term in itself, admittedly (rather than best content management platform for example), but that's still a bit cool, right?

SFM Project Management

Another new site for an existing client, SFM Project Management offers services to self-builders. Text content, titles and so on were all defined by a friend of the client.

As Kourou sites go, it's pretty straightforward, not employing any particularly fancy features or plug-ins, but that reflected in the speed of design and implementation - and therefore the overall cost to the client.

Highshot Events

Produced to support a new venture for an existing client, Highshot Events promotes a clay pigeon shooting business. Based at the upmarket Groomes hotel in rural Hampshire but also offering a quality mobile service, Highshot Events needed a website that was, in the words of the client, "calming, inviting and exciting" and consistent with the country/rural feel of both the hotel and the business. We hope you'll agree we've succeeded!

We'll be honest and admit we're not the biggest fans of Flash, since it can make websites slow, fiddly and unreliable to use. However used judiciously it can enhance some sites, with Flash being used for the fancy slideshows at the foot of many of the pages on this one. We also use Goznet Systems' proven square_thumb_gallery on the site, making it easy to add stylish browsable photos into the mix.

Farnham Conservative Club

Farnham Conservative Club needed to move with the times and get themselves on to the web, and Kourou proved the ideal system to help them do so. The website uses various photographs - some provided by the client and some taken by Goznet Systems during a guided tour of the premises. An interesting feature of the website is the sidebar menu, including an option for special events, with everything easily updated by the client.

The Urbanist

Gone live today is the website for top airbrush artist The Urbanist, to coincide with his appearance on ITV's Daybreak alongside Adrian Chiles, Christine Bleakley and special guests Katie Waissel and Paije Richardson from the X Factor.

Roda Golf Holiday Lets

Roda Golf Holiday Lets website rolled out live today. Content and SEO by a friend of the client, but all design and implementation by Goznet Systems. Kourou does the business yet again, including the first outing for the funky new square_thumb_gallery quick and easy photo gallery plug-in.