Milton Bayer successfully launched the last of the LCI (London Clubs International) casinos website redesigns last week.

We worked with LCI on their 9 nationwide casinos to give them an updated style that makes them all conform to the LCI group, but also gives them their own look using the casino colour schemes and club photography.

The new sites are fully content managed with various sections such as events, bars, restaurants, experience packages and private function space. These areas feature galleries, virtual tours and integrated online booking with various 3rd parties including OpenTable, Book-a-Table and TicketScript.

Along with Playboy Club London, we have now launched 10 new sites with LCI in the past 6 months. We also have a number of further digital projects on the horizon with LCI in 2012 that we’ll share with you soon.

Websites:

• Casino at the Empire – Leicester Square, London, http://www.thecasinolsq.com/
• Alea Casino – Glasgow, http://glasgow.aleacasinos.com/
• Golden Nugget London, http://www.goldennuggetlondon.com/
• Manchester 235, http://www.manchester235.com/
• Rendezvous Casino – Southend, http://southend.rendezvouscasino.com/
• Alea Casino – Leeds, http://leeds.aleacasinos.com/
• Rendezvous Casino – Brighton, http://brighton.rendezvouscasino.com/
• The Sportsman Casino – London, http://www.thesportsmancasino.com/
• Alea Casino – Nottingham, http://nottingham.aleacasinos.com/
• Playboy Club London, http://www.playboyclublondon.com/

As is the way in today’s paperless world, we’re donating the money we’d spend on a Christmas card to charity, and we’re spreading the Christmas spirit electronically.

However, a plain old e-card just wouldn’t be us, so we’ve come up with our own yuletide game for you. See if you can find the 50 ‘subliminal’ brands. Be warned; it’s highly addictive!  If you’re stuck tweet us!

What are you waiting for?

What does it mean to be a Trip Advisor contributor? Does it mean that you are professional critique? Does it mean that you have travelled the world and stayed in all types of accommodation? Well in some cases, yes but in most cases no.

Trip Advisor was set up as a review website where users can leaves comments about accommodation, good or bad and let the public decide if they want to go and stay there.

A programme on Monday night on Channel 4 showed that the site has become much more this. It is now a powerful weapon which can make or break a business – in some cases destroying it overnight.

Most people who use trip advisor will read the reviews and make up their mind as to whether the good comments out-way the bad comments and from there, make a decision.
However, some people on Trip-Advisor have now taken it upon themselves to become the ultimate critique and look for things to nit-pic at and write a bad review – not look for the good things and then write the negatives that transpire, but actually look for negatives things straight away.

They claim it is because potential other customers have a right to know. This is true. But when does it change form writing an amateur review to setting out to destroy businesses which people have ploughed their life and their into.

It seems that no matter how you look at it, you will always find good or bad reviews as you can’t please everyone but at the same time, don’t go to a bed and breakfast for £80 a night and expect a £350+ hotel room for the night!

If you’re interested in receiving a new 2012 calendar, get in touch: digital@miltonbayer.com and we’ll pop one in the post.

Download 2011 Calendar

We decided to give Movember a go this year, and here are the results!

Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

We managed to raise close to £400, so a massive thank you to all of you who sponsored us!:

Roberto Petrozzi
Lorraine Streatfield
Ann & Ray (the First) Wellington
Libby Hill
Sam Sheridan
Victoria Millband
Roz Beeson
Dave Beeson
Sarah Brown
Gill Clements
Ronnie Gibbon
Sophia Gibbon
David Gibbon
Maureen Gibbon
Richard Gibbon
Ann Saunders
Kim and Cal Wong
Ria Wong
Vanessa Welham
San Wong
Joe Linnane
Laura Hill
Matt Smith
Susie Reed
And “anonymous”!

Thank you everyone!

Up-until now we’ve always opted to build fully custom sites in PHP using Zend Framework, extending the functionality using open source software like WordPress for blogs. The hesitation to jump on board with a CMS for a full site build was that we always felt limitations would cost us dearly in the end, but in reality limitations are usually caused by a lack of the developer’s knowledge.

Whether we used Drupal, Joomla or WordPress essentially the same end result can be achieved for the frontend users so we choose mainly based on the ease of build and content maintenance.

These are the fundamental areas we assessed when looking at the different CMS’s:

• Core functionality (obviously)
• Available modules
• Performance, caching options and such
• Admin/client administration, during build and on-going
• Theme creation
• Module programming
• And finally flexibility & scalability

How the Builds Went…

A major reason to use an open source CMS is to speed up the development of a site, along with giving the client a site that should never go out of date. However we expected the build of our first few to take considerably longer to create, this wasn’t actually the case and we soon got used to the style of development and managed to complete the sites as fast, if not faster, than in our custom style. This bodes very well as we should only get faster with each successive site along with improving our techniques used each time.

We’ve used a range of modules on top of the core ones (around 15 – 20) such as PathAuto, WebForm, Feeds and NodeQueue but the one we couldn’t live without has to be Views. The power Views gives in displaying content types in different ways is awesome. We also really liked the administration overlays, which can basically allow a client with limited permissions to navigate the frontend and control their content without having the experience of ever entering an admin area.

Going Forward

We’ll keep you posted on whether we stick with Drupal or give the others a go, in the end we’ll likely switch between them based on the individual requirements of the project and the client.

Drupal Sites in Progress

Trends UK

Criterion Restaurant

Farcela

Footnotes:
– Sorry if the article image is a bit lame, I am a developer not a designer after all.
– It did feel slightly wrong promoting Drupal on a WordPress blog, but I got over it and you’ll need to do the same.

What is WordPress?

It’s a free, open-source application contributed to by a community of professional volunteers and developers.
It’s much more than a blog tool, it’s a publishing platform used by thousands of companies and individuals.
It’s among a shortlist that we recommend and the reason for this is simple; our clients find it easy to use.
We don’t want to reinvent the wheel here, we simply use it to it’s full potential.

• Full standards compliance
• Lightweight
• Fast load times
• Secure
• SEO friendly
• User comments and approval
• Spam protection
• Full user registration
• Easy importing
• Intelligent text formatting
• Multiple authors/users
• Easy installation and upgrades

So, why use it?

The Interface

It’s uncluttered and stripped to the bare minimum. The navigation sits to the left and you’re able to collapse/expand this panel to maximise real estate for the main content areas.

Core Functionality

You can easily create new pages, posts and categories. Choose from a set of pre-designed templates for your pages to help create unique content. You’re also able to take control and order content by priority as well as import any media such as imagery or video.

Widgets

Widgets are custom content areas, usually dynamic and pull information from a database. You’re able to order these as you see fit on each of the pages. Some examples are Flickr images or Twitter feeds etc.

Optimisation

Unlike some Content Management Systems, WordPress is fully SEO-friendly and quickly gets picked up on major search engines.

What we’ve produced…

Who else is using it?

Useful Links

1. WordPress.org
2. Themes
3. Plugins
4. Installing WordPress
5. The Best of WordPress