The latest project to leave our office and go into the big wide world is the Sophie Kyron Jewellery web site.

Sophie is an amazing designer and creator of stunning jewellery pieces, well known in the fashion industry. Her designs have been worn by models and actors all over the world, and the new site lets everyone see and purchase the latest collection pieces.

From the start of the project, we had to make sure that the site design was clean an unobtrusive - to make the jewellery the centrepiece. The bright and vibrant colours used by Sophie in her designs really stand out, and gives the whole site a warm feel.

Rounding out the extensive online catalogue & shop, the site also has news articles about the latest products, editorials from publications around the world, and image galleries featuring the collection photo shoots.

The finalists for the 2008 WA Web Awards were announced last week, and once again Clever Starfish has multiple nominated sites.

In the Virtual Business category, we have the unusual To Be Or Not To Be (An Actor) audio book site, as well as audio file manager Media Monkey, a project the Starfish have been involved with for almost two years now. In the Non-Profit category, we have the ColdFusion User Group of WA, which was done as a joint project with CFUGWA manager Andrew Mercer of Webonix.

Another one of our sites, Creative Quilting, missed out on being a finalist but was highly commended in the Retail Business category. A side-project “travel and metal blog” run by Kay, Dave and Al – Hell Bent for Wacken – also made the highly commended list.

In last year’s WA Web Awards, we won the Small Business category with Ken Drake Photography. Unfortunately, Ken’s new site, Zoo Studio, was not quite finished in time to be entered in the awards!

The Clever Starfish team would like to congratulate all of our friends and colleagues who also made the finals – Matt Didcoe for the Midnite Youth Theatre Company site, Simone’s Enjoy Perth, Matt from Abstract Gourmet, Madpilot Myles Eftos’ amazing Super Mario Bros experiment, Jordan Brock for Five Senses Coffee (the only site shortlisted in more than one category!), and the entire Bam Creative team for pulling in the most number of nominations (4). 

Whew, we’re back!

Due to a denial of service attack on our US-based web host, the Clever Starfish web site was unavailable for 24 hours from Sunday evening. Fortunately, none of our US-hosted client web sites were affected, as they reside on a separate machine at the facility.

Over the past few weeks we have been in the process of moving all of our clients to Fasthit, a local hosting company. Fasthit has excellent pricing, fast servers and great support response times as well as a complete range of accounts (both Windows and Linux), and we’ve been really happy so far with the accounts that have already moved. After this latest issue, we will be speeding up the migration process to get all our clients sites and our own sites over to the new system.

You can’t beat picking up the phone and talking to a system administrator in your own timezone!