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.