Just where the hell has 2019 gone? I cant believe we’re already into the third month – surely it was only a week or two ago that we were celebrating La Sainte Silvestre (as New Year’s Eve is called out here). Well time does tend to fly by when you keep busy and we’ve certainly had a productive start to the year at Port 80.

For starters, we finished and put live two websites we’d been working on last year. The first, Lard Du Gout, is for a local caterer. Owner, Loic had an existing site but it had become dated and lacked a mobile-friendly version.

His shiny new wordpress site now looks as good on a PC as it does on a smartphone.

The second one was Stars Saint Tropez, a holiday rental service in the French Riviera. Formerly known as Repco Villas, they rebranded last year and as part of that, commissioned us to make them a new website.

For this project, we made use of a nifty wordpress feature called « Advanced Custom Fields » that allows you to create your own content templates.

With ACF, in addition to the standard options of “page” or “blog post”, you can create new entreily content types for whatever you need, and personalise how their information is displayed. We used this to create “Apartment and “Villa” content types, allowing the owners to easily list their new properties for sale.

Other Projects

In addition to building new websites from the ground up, we’ve also been doing a lot of work lately on existing websites. One such project was for Angélique Sawtell, a real-estate agent based in La Rochelle. She was mostly happy with her website, made a by a third party, but she had a few concerns about aspects of the design. We reviewed it and found a number of ways to improve the visual impact as well as the overall user experience.

Another such project we’re working on has a truly international feel to it. It is for AXT PTY, an Australian company that produce hi-tech scientific equipment. They were looking to add a new feature to their website to present their products in various different ways. They’d found a tool they liked the look of, made by a company called Artisan Themes, in Buenos Aires.

We at Port 80 sometimes use Artisan Themes’s tools too, and have a pre-existing relationship with the owners. When AXT explained what they were after, the guys at Artisan Themes put them in touch with us, as it’s just the kind of geeky, technical challenge that our programmer Matt loves. An Australian client is referred to a British team based in France, by a company in South America! Globalisation in action…

So, now you know what we’ve been up to so far this year, and why we’ve yet again been neglecting our poor blog. As ever, we aim to do better.