Redcar's New Community Radio Station

A quick and rather belated blog as the weekend was taken up with an emergency assignment for a company I am an examiner for as their on-line system had been hacked and needed a replacement doing fast plus some updates to the PalaceFM website at www.palacefm.com ready for launch on Monday morning. (A bit of a fib as I did also do a beer-Boro-beer combo on Saturday meaning I only worked in the morning).

Last night (Monday) we were at the PalaceFM launch party and had a good time and despite the free wine we're all in bright eyed and bushy tailed this morning.

Will do a proper blog this coming weekend with a bit more on what we've been up to.

Yes I Am That Geeky

A short post this week as I've got a bit of work to do to get the Middlesbrough Midweek Cricket League website ready for the new season (I've been the web-master for this for years) and then I'm of out to play chess for Middlesbrough in the Northern Counties Chess Union Major Club Championship semi-final. This is a tournament we won last year, so rather bizarrely that makes me a northern champion, tha' knows, 'appen. So later this morning I'm off to York with 3 other Middlesbrough players as we try to defend our title.

The week has seen us working on a plethora of websites big and small, static and dynamic, e-commerce and no payments plus meet a few new businesses who we may develop a relationship with. More details in coming weeks as projects get finished and I have more time to write.

So computing AND chess - I'm considering taking up train-spotting and getting the full set!

PalaceFM Coming Soon

A busy week with actual web design being the main task throughout the week not just for the Tad Web Solutions team but also for me. We've been working on a number of sites big and small including:

Two sites for PDS UK (one below)

Ouch, Personal Injury Claims Solicitors

The main focus has been on two websites that will be fully launched by the end of the month. The first is in conjunction with Cleveland Police and the University of Teesside and we'll give more details when that is up and running.

The second is for PalaceFM, the new community radio station launching on 29th April from the studio down the corridor from us in The Place Hub, Redcar. There's still a lot to do with the website but the outline design is now online and over the next fortnight we'll be adding the content and all the dynamic functionality that will come with  it. A great project to be involved with and we're looking forward to volunteering (yes that's right, volunteering, as in free - well it is a community radio station) to manage the website moving forward.

We're also managing the PalaceFM social media (we means Peter really) and he's doing a great job plus all the other people involved are chipping in via their own social media channels. The Facebook page at www.facebook.com/PalaceFm has a growing number of followers and an increasing reach and the Twitter account @PalaceFM has well over 200 followers in a short space of time. So join their social media feeds and get involved with this new, local radio station.

See you all next week.

Radio Killed the Radio Star

Buggles (one for the youngsters there!) had it all wrong as Friday saw the very sad announcement that TFM would "merge" with Metro radio and become Tyneside based. So the parent group of the radio station have effectively killed off Teesside's main independent radio station. What are we left with if we want local radio content? Well there is the excellent BBC Tees including the weekly fix of Boro commentaries for anyone wishing to become depressed (that's a comment on the fortunes of Boro not the brilliant Ali Brownlee and Higgy). There is also to shortly be a new community radio station based in The Palace Hub, Redcar as this month sees the launch of PalaceFM.

Launching later this month, PalaceFM will include an arts programme RAW pm which we are having some minor input into (but leaving most of it to people who know what they're on about!). Exciting stuff and at the end of last week we (when I say we I mean Peter) created the new logo for the station. Modesty prevents me from saying which company will be creating the website for the station, ahem.

There was a lot of work on other projects last week including the launch of the new Richardson Moving & Storage website which went live on Friday. It's not completely finished (I actually never think a website is completely finished) but has progressed sufficiently to make it live and we'll tweak it over the next couple of weeks. It's a Wordpress site and today I'll be plugging in Yoast and setting up the SEO content for it. It's really good to have them with us after they did such a great job with our office move.

What of the rest of last week? A number of meetings that saw us get involved in some new pieces of work, move forward the PalaceFM plans and networking. As the business grows there are more and more meetings and the key is to only arrange/attend a meeting if there is a point to them. We also worked on the non-mobile version of the Ouch! website which we'll complete on Monday, a new design for a local PC repair company website, a website for a local builders, business cards for a hypnotherapist in the South of England with a website to follow, some work on the project with Cleveland police, migrating our customers' websites to a new server and the usual stuff of marketing, SEO and running Cleveland Hour on Twitter.

A very busy week and long may it continue. Next week sees website work for Richardson Moving & Storage, PalaceFM, police project, the pc repair company, a local marketing company, a marketing company in Birmingham, a local gardener, a local plumber, a dyslexia project, hypnotherapist, Ouch! and if time permits (and I don't see how it will) a new artists website we're planning.

I'm now off to take my hangover onto Adobe CS6 for some work.