Selwyn & Ink
Graphic and product design has always been a passion of mine, particularly in relation to restoring Dunans (of course!). Our new red boxes are spectacularly lovely, and I just wanted to share the design (and the rest of the package) which includes a square foot of the castle itself. If we can sell every square foot of the castle, we will be able to restore the building fully. So that’s the target for the next 12 months or so.
The clearance of the back two compartments of the castle has taken much longer than the others, simply because they aren’t accessible by the minidigger and there’s not enough room for more than a couple of workers. Our luck continues with the floors, which are all concrete, making clearance much much easier than suspended floors.
If you want to help with castle or bridge we have two volunteer fortnights in May 2020 and September 2020 – available here.
We wanted to do something different with our signage, refresh it yes, but more than that. Reflect our ambition, create something familiar yet original. I think we’ve done it. (Please ignore the calibration and cropmarks!)
If this sounds like an advert, it is not – well, unless you call it promotion for my business.
I have been working with Shopify for a while now to deliver the ScottishLaird.co.uk website. It has been a wholly fantastic experience answering all of my needs as an ecommerce vendor without let or pause. We’ve seen 40% growth this year simply by transferring platforms. Things like cart recovery and customers signing up for notifications on when new stock comes in have really helped. 100% uptime, rock solid servers and well-thought out user experience have also done their bit. But what has been really impressive is how, when we ask a particularly difficult question of the system, it rises to the challenge.
Languages represent a barrier to entry for any website wishing to break into new territories. English is the Lingua Franca of the internet, but frankly, there are limits. We found them in Finland, Sweden and elsewhere. But for us France has been one of the most difficult countries and languages to break into. French is a lovely language, and having a very little, I appreciate how different and distinctive it is. We were recently very lucky to be approached by the folks at franceagora.fr who wished to promote ScottishLaird.co.uk in France (See ‘Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!…’).
To cut a long story short, after wondering exactly how we were going to create a fully translated website to service this new and exciting market which Anne and her team have been busily working on, we finally found Langify, an app within Shopify, and its been a revelation!
With translations from Agora and some on-the-fly work from google translate, which we’re updating for accuracy, the system now recognises our French customers and serves the French version, including our wonderful slideshow en Français!
As my girls would say, Ooh La La!
And you can see the (admittedly work-in-progress) French version by visiting our website, scrolling to the bottom and selecting the language in the pop-up.
Now, I’ve got the bug. First php, then mysql, now French … Anyone for German?
Delighted to report coverage in the National French newspaper, along with exposure on French Radio and Online News outlets here and here!
Here’s the cover of the supplement, with a photo by our very own Jean Donaldson at Powan, gracing the cover:
Thanks to Anne des Froux for the coverage! and to find out more go to ScottishLaird.co.uk
Stuck for a gift for the man who has everything? Can’t think of what to buy your teenage nephew? Mental block about a gorgeous Christmas present for your mother? ScottishLaird.co.uk has the answer – of course it does!
Delighted to announce another product now launched on the ScottishLaird.co.uk website: smartphone cases for iPhone 5 onwards and the Samsung Note range.
We’ve presently four designs to choose from, the plain Dunans Rising Tartan, the Lord’s/Laird’s/Lady’s phone (on tartan), the Spring view of Dunans Castle (taken by myself in 2005) and Jean Donaldson’s wonderful shot of the insignia which graces the curtain wall at Dunans.
We think they are all fabby, hope you do too! You’ll find them all here.
Postcodes and GPS coordinates are, let’s face it, complex and easy to get wrong – particularly when you are trying to remember them to put them into your satnav / maps / google maps. The What3words app is the answer. I know without looking at the title of this post that the coordinate for the drivehead at Dunans is fragment.curly.firebird. The postcode covers at least three other houses and the GPS, well, I am just not sure. But a mirror image of a phoenix with curly feathers ripped in half, means that whenever someone needs an accurate location, I have it to hand, immediately… Similarly, I have a visual image of a bunch of guys in lab coats, in a kitchen, drinking tea back to front … genius, particularly as they’re in the castle when they are doing it.
With 40,000 words and consequently 57 trillion combinations, the world can be covered in three metre squares, or the size of the average room. And it is all so memorable. So for example here’s one I particularly love which identifies a place I often have to meet newcomers to the glen in – flukes.reports.unicorns. However, I am not sure the committee would approve – but then I do have a mental image of a narwhal reading a paper inside out?!
For balance I should just add sheep.conga.pleaser … !
