We pride ourselves on producing high quality websites that fully conform to the highest web standards. Our sites are accessible and search engine friendly, making sure that all our sites have the best possible chance of succeeding where so many others fail.
It’s been a while since we updated this site so here’s the latest news from Best Served Cold. We’ve both been working on various new and existing projects: CK Clinical and CK Science have had a small makeover, Pressitt has been growing and we’re making continuous updates and changes to improve the service.
We’ve been completing and working on a few smaller sites as well, with Rooney Electrical improving and Dioni getting some updates.
At the moment we’re both working on external sites for larger organisations and will hopefully be able to talk about those projects soon. Let us know if you need any design work or a WordPress site built or edited… we can help with social media, marketing, SEO, Accessibility – everything you need!
The Party Times is a blog dedicated to parties. The contributors regularly write features on the best new trends in parties, new cake recipes and their own experiences with setting up parties and party planning. The blog is part of the Party Pieces website which sells everything you need for your own party.
We were contacted in 2010 to start working on a new layout and make updates to the site and since then we’ve been involved regularly with site changes and updates as The Party Times has expanded. The site is built on WordPress and we’ve used our experience with the platform to make it easier for the writers to add content and update the site.
2010 was very busy for us – with the redesign and updates of Pressitt, the success of our “101 Best” sites and continuing to build relationships with new clients and customers. We certainly needed a break for Christmas!
But, now we’re back and raring to go. We have lots of new ideas for improvements to the “101 Best” sites and we’ve started growing the group already with 101 Best Board Games (please submit your favourite game) – there’s lots more to come this year! One of our surprise hits was the 101 Best HTML5 Sites showcase that we set up last summer, it’s become one of the top showcases for the new web standard HTML5. We’re hoping for another year of growth in 2011.
We’re also putting the finishing touches to a few updates for Pressitt, lots more about that coming soon.
Our client list is always growing and hopefully we have a few more names for our portfolio arriving in the next couple of months. Our latest site, for Willow Primary School in Slough, is now live and the team at the school are adding content all the time. Towards the end of last year we also had the opportunity to work on a redesign and update of the Party Times blog – part of the well known Party Pieces website.
Please let us know if you need any web design or development work on your site – we specialise in WordPress sites and have created fully bespoke themes for clients.
We’ve recently launched a new site for a local electrician in Langford, Bedfordshire: Rooney Electrical. They are a small, family run commerical and domestic electrical company.
Rooney Electrical are experienced in electrical testing and certificating, generally known as Landlord certificates. Our qualified testing electricians can help with all the electrical paperwork required by law. Installation of new consumer units (fuse boards) and lamp replacement (as needed or as part of planned maintenance).
They can also manage all the usual commercial and domestic electrical requirements: Work space relocation or installation of moving floor sockets, data points, lighting. Portable Appliance Testing (PAT testing) and Periodic Inspection Report (PIR). Dado trunking for sockets, data points & telephone points. Emergency lighting systems and display lighting as well as outside lighting.
We are a family run, Part P registered, Government approved, commercial and domestic electrical company. Working in and around Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Over the years we have helped many homes and businesses with all their electrical requirements by listening to customers needs and then carrying out what they asked for in a professional, economical and practical way.
View the Rooney Electrical site here
Follow the latest news from Rooney Electrical
The site is built in WordPress using a Woo Themes template that we heavily edited and added a full e-Commerce platform to.
This is something I’ve only just found about: the WordPress for Android application. As an extensive user of WordPress on a number of websites (including this one) and an Android phone owner I think this could be very useful!
WordPress for Android is an Open Source app that empowers you to write new posts, edit content, and manage comments with built-in notifications. Download it now and get blogging in no time. The latest version of the app has just been released:
WordPress for Android 1.3.8 has been released to Android Market. We squashed some bugs that we received from Android Market reports as well as added a new feature!
You can find out more about the project and download the app here: http://android.wordpress.org/
WordPress for Android is an Open Source project, which means anyone can play a part in its development. WordPress for Android is released under the GNU General Public License. Both our app and our source code are free to download and use however you’d like. In return, if you are able, we’d love it if you contributed your code, your design talents, or even just your suggestions back to the project.
To download the app from the Android app market, follow this link from your phone: market://search?q=pname:org.wordpress.android
If you enjoy using this app, why not vote for it on our very own 101 Best Android Apps
Even though WordPress is very popular and, to fairly technical minded people, easy to use there is still a bit of a learning curve to get the most out of all the features. Now, I’m not talking about designing and building new WordPress themes or plugins – I mean blogging, writing pages, uploading images and making sure the content works.
A lot of people would be reading that and shaking their head: “WordPress is SO easy! How can anyone not understand how it works?”. But to somebody not used to any kind of computer software, let alone a content management system (CMS), it can be pretty daunting.
Over the last few years we’ve worked with a number of clients who have all wanted a CMS on their site, they don’t like the idea of paying us more money just to copy and paste text into their site – which is fair enough, it’s not something we really want to be doing either! When we’ve looked at all the various CMS available, something has stood out – if you design the theme correctly, WordPress is by far the easiest for most people to pick up straight away. Expression Engine is very good as is Drupal and Joomla but they always feel a bit over complicated.
But, even with something as simple as WordPress, we still need to train people how to use the features to best show off their site, keep the site search engine optimised and make sure the blog or news is regularly updated.
We’ve always found a simple face-to-face training session has worked best. It’s all very well showing YouTube videos to people or forcing them to read long winded PDFs but it’s just not the same as being in the same room and teaching them to work it on their own computer.
For starters we concentrate on what is WordPress and the difference between Posts and Pages. And from there we move straight onto adding content. After 30 minutes even the least technically minded people can write a new post, add and image and link off to another website. It might sound pretty basic but there’s a lot of people who wouldn’t know where to start otherwise.
If you’re using WordPress for more than just a blog, or planning a new website, it can very soon become a very large and difficult to understand piece of software. All those pages, categories, posts and tags can become quite overwhelming. If you need help with your WordPress site – we can probably help! We have designed and built bespoke themes, edited plugins and helped train users of several of our sites to make the most out of the WordPress cms.
We’d been working with the East and North Herts NHS Trust for several months when we got the contract to completely re-design and update their website. Our brief was to design and build a very clean, simple and easy to use website that could be updated by the NHS Trust without needing constant editing and changing by us.
We provide a wide range of acute inpatient services including A&E and maternity at the Lister and QEII. We also provide outpatient care to people at Hertford County, the Lister and the QEII.
We run Mount Vernon, one of the country’s top 5 cancer treatment centres, which provides specialist tertiary chemotherapy and radiotherapy services.
The site is built using WordPress as the content management system with a number of plugins that have been edited to make to work specifically with the website.
Are you looking for professional web design in Letchworth? Best Served Cold have been designing and building websites in the Letchworth area since 2003. We started off building small sites for ourselves and our friends but soon got recommended to companies across Hertfordshire.
There are a number of factors you should consider when looking for a web design company to build your new website, just the same as a company offering to design and build anything else for you: quality of work, previous experience, knowledge, skill and professionalism.
At Best Served Cold you can see from our portfolio of local clients in the Letchworth and Hertfordshire area that we satisfy all these requirements. Having worked with local groups and businesses in the area and government agencies we are well placed to talk through any requirements you may have for a new website.
No matter the size of your group or business in Letchworth we can design a website to suit. We specialise in the creation of content managed websites using WordPress and can also offer SEO, accessibility, social media training and other tools to ensure your new website is of the highest quality.
Nylon Films is a video and stills production company based in London. We met Nylon through the recommendation of another client and worked closely with them to produce and develop a site to showcase their video and photography work.
Nylon films helps clients tell their unique stories through film, video, stills photography and other multimedia formats. Whether it’s corporate films or documentary films, training videos or music videos, viral ads or internet ads – we think the end product should always make for compelling viewing. Therefore, at the heart of all of our productions, you’ll find good storytelling and high production values; and, using state of the art technologies, we are able to provide these multimedia solutions cost-effectively.
We spent time with Nylon to discuss their social marketing plan and worked closely with them to integrate media from Vimeo and Flickr into their site. The use of social networks to promote websites is increasing and at Best Served Cold we try to encourage all our clients to get involved in this exciting new area of marketing.
Here’s another site that we completed for a client recently: Dioni – Self catering accommodation in Snowdonia. We built the site using a theme for WordPress that we bought specifically for the site. Originally an estate agent theme we modified it and added several new plugins to make it work seamlessly for the Dioni cottage site.
Although not one of our bespoke designs we are very happy with how this site has worked out. It’s been part of our special offer that we created for this exact type of project – a small business that needed a professional website but without the high costs associated with a full website design and development.
Here’s something about Dioni:
We’ve set up a small business to help friends and neighbours advertise and book their self catering properties here in Snowdonia. We’ve been quite choosey about the properties that we’ve taken on, so hopefully you’ll agree that they are all very nice and with a bit of luck you’ll find some great accommodation in what we think is a fantastic little corner of North Wales.
Our original plans for the special offer was to help out local businesses in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, which is why we came up with the idea in the first place. We realised that there are lots of small businesses that need a web presence but haven’t got the knowledge to get online themselves or the money to pay for a large scale website. Using WordPress and a pre-built theme that we edit and set up for small companies in the area we are hoping to get businesses in the Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire area online with a professional site, coded to high standards for SEO and Accessibility with a full Content Management System (CMS) for just a fraction of the price.
Although we started out with the aim of keeping the special offer targetted to local businesses we are happy to work remotely with clients from all over the UK or abroad to get a WordPress site up and running. Please let us know if you have an idea for a site and would like to get online, especially if you’re in Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire – we can meet you and talk you through your requirements and how we can set you up with a CMS based website for less than you think!