Established in 2000 by husband and wife team,  Lu and Will Chignell, the charity was born out of their desire to help local children achieve an education despite the lack of government funding and the struggle for local families to meet even their most basic needs of food, clothes and medicines.

Chiwawatala, Chilongozi and Yosefe schools in the Luangwa Valley have been developed and supported by the Sausage Tree Charity and the team continue to expand their vision for bringing in new teachers and increasing the capacity of the classrooms.

We are very excited to be given the opportunity to contribute to this project.  We have designed a new identity based on a lovely webfont called Neucha and a new website is currently under construction using the excellent Woothemes Canvas theme.  More news on this project soon.  In the meantime watch the following video if you’d like to know more about the work being carried out by The Sausage Tree Charity:

Evolving approached SUGAR to develop the WordPress templates for an existing design and we are very close to being able to launch a brand new version of the Evolving Networks site that is fully updateable. This site makes use of the new custom post types facilities in WordPress 3.0 to make it easier to manage the FAQ pages.

Traffic to social networks during May 2010 passed the traffic to search engines.  That is quite a milestone and from the looks of things it is not going to get reversed anytime soon.  Despite the controversy surrounding Facebook’s privacy policies, the site continues to grow at an astonishing rate garnering 55% of all social network traffic in the UK. Youtube and Twitter are the other two standout sites in the UK with Bebo and MySpace falling away over the last year.

So what does this mean for your business?

At SUGAR we’re experiencing some great results with Linkedin and Twitter.  With Linkedin’s ability to support a company listing getting your key people more exposure on this network is an absolute must.  Using Cotweet for Twitter makes perfect sense for teams where multiple accounts can be setup easily with task assignments and “on duty” notifications. We’re still holding out on Facebook’s usefulness for B2B connections, but it’s growth and reach can no longer be ignored.

Contact David if you’d like more information on how to make your first foray into Social Media, these are online services you can no longer afford to avoid.

SUGAR are very happy to be building a brand new site for Searle & Taylor in 2010 and look forward to spreading the word about this great local company.

Have you come across a situation where you have a javascript carousel or accordian that is fairly content heavy? When the page loads the list items or the div content flash onto the screen until the page loads and then the whole page “pops” into place.  Very annoying effect when you’re on a slower connection.

I dealt with this problem on the home page of the new auditel.co.uk site.  On this page I’m using the excellent jQuery library and a modified version of the useful plugin called jflow that allows for autoscrolling.  The technique below was documented on the Learning jQuery site and uses a combination of javascript and css to hide the extra content until the page finishes loading.

This year I’d like to celebrate my partner Jenni.  Besides working on her jewellery business Twinkleberry, she has steadily ramped up her involvement with SUGAR until today she is pretty much working with me full-time in delivering our web services to a growing group of clients.  In this process she has had to learn to use quite a few new applications and generally increase her knowledge of the web and search engines.  All I can say is that I am one very lucky guy to have her working with me and I cannot think of any other woman in my life who I’d like to celebrate more today.  Thank you Jenni.

Do follow the ongoing adventures in comic form of Lovelace and Babbage published at 2D Goggles. Thanks to Sydney for reminding me to celebrate women in tech.

Welcome onboard!

We are very excited to be working on such a worthwhile topic (we won’t spill the beans here!) and will post more details once the site goes live.

The site makes extensive use of custom category pages to run the “From the Classroom” and “School News” sections. We were particularly excited about the “From the Classroom” section since it presented an opportunity for the students in the school to contribute to the site and use it as a showcase for their work.

Feedback from staff and parents on the design and functionality of the site has been very positive so far. We have dropped in to the school a number of times to check on progress and we’ve been very pleased with how the school has just been able to get on with posting content and updates. It is a testament to the excellent work done on the WordPress project that the first experience a group of primary teachers have had with a CMS has been so positive.

A special word of thanks to Rob Schlüter and his excellent “Archives by Category” plugin for WordPress. Our jQuery gallery is delivered via Christophe Beyls’s Slimbox 2.