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Work (and Play)

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I've been a busy boy over the last three months, working away fairly frantically (in as much as I do frantic these days, which isn't very to be honest) at a number of web sites. Some I can tell you about, some I can't.

Let's start off with something simple. Birdbrook Lees is a marketing consultancy run by David Frew. It's a new company and I've created a web site for while he's helped me with some marketing advice. As a result of which The Hug has published its first newsletter.

Actually the fact that he's a customer illustrates very neatly how network marketing works very well for me. I created the Milton Village site some years ago now. As a result of which Ormiston, a charity with an office in Milton heard of me and asked for advice when they were putting together a funding bid for a web site for HARP (Help and Advice for Relative of Prisoners). They won that bid and I then quoted for and produced a web site for them. You can read about it here - it even won an award.

Much of the work I've done since arose from that HARP web site, the first web site someone had paid The Hug to produce. For example Harriet Haylock was my contact at Ormiston. She left Ormiston and married David Frew and I've since done a web site for her and now I've done one for him.

But getting back to what I've been up to the thing that's occupied most of my time has been two new web sites for Make Votes Count. MVC are a cross party umbrella organisation campaigning for electoral reform. The partners include some of the main parties, Lib Dems, Greens, welsh and scots nationalists etc plus the Electoral Reform Society and some others.

The main web site Make My Vote Count is a campaign web site for the general election and it went live a couple of weeks ago. It features an online petition which includes the ability to mail your constituency candidates to say you've signed it, a constituency finder (by postcode), chat rooms (using phpBB2), quizzes, and a blog (using Movable Type). Everything apart from the blog and the original template design are the work of The Hug.

The other web site for the campaign is more fun, VoteVote! is a site which allows you to create and vote on polls using the STV/AV system of PR. The intention is to use this as a way of attracting people to the main site. The code for this is based on some PHP from an american who created a site DemoChoice. I've re-worked it to make it more UK-centric and also improve some features of it (tighter HTML, judicious use of headers to stop page caching). This site went live only a few days before the election was officially announced.

Tags: national politics, web design, work Written 07/04/05

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