The Poile blog

My most recent development with Imaginet is this TOC website for London Midland. The site is complex integrating several 3rd party webservices to provide customer services and real time information. The site makes extensive use of AJAX and Javascript to provide maximum functionality within the constraints of the design. The result is an attractive highly functional website, which works well and provides all the information for customers that they may need.

Launched in January 2008 the new chiltern site was a major upgrade from their previous site. The site boasts numerous 3rd party feed integrations, for live travel information, station information and news.

Part of the project was to create a destination's style portal using google maps and integrating data from Visit Britain.

The systems were brought together using Visit Britains webservices portal and overlaid using distance measures from stations to calculate relevant attractions, accommodations and events for travellers. The site also contains a bespoke online magazine, a personalizable station information page. Met office weather data is used to show forecasts for each station to great effect.

HERIAN - meaning Heritage In Action, is a south wales initiative to promote the history of south wales, providing resources and access to information about movements such as Chartism and famous landmarks.

The herian project website provides information for visitors to wales providing accommodation, attractions and events data in a interactive way using google maps to show nearby places, or using a route planning system to allow you to visually see where nearby attractions and events are to your route through wales.

The site is split in 2 with a series of kiosks distributed across south wales presenting targetted information to visitors at attractions across the south of wales. Both site and kiosk make use of Google maps, the site intended for users with pcs and laptops, and the kiosks aimed at people who can poke things and have a enjoyable time finding information about their surrounding area.

Attraction, Accommodation data is pulled in directly from Visit Wales processed and managed automatically using webservices. Events data is also pulled from Mid Wales Tourism using a webservice, events data is also imported from the South west wales tourism partnership website using a separate webservice. These sources of data are combined in the website, which also allows for events and attractions to be added manually via the website.

The site and kiosk both provide printable itineraries as well as an itinerary creator which is used in conjunction with the interactive mapping and accommodation, attraction and event listings.

Both the site and kiosk are also fully bilingual with the exception of external data which could not be translated by the vendor

Millers antiques is a site specialising in providing detailed information about antiques, antiques buyers and sellers and shows, auctions and exhibitions of those items people prize. The site allows for multiple membership types and provides subscription services.

I was involved in the initial speccing of the millers antiques site, and was responsible for creating the bespoke blogging system which is being used to great effect to highlight the most important items and events in the antiques world. The blog uses a bespoke back end to allow the millers antiques site team to manage posts creating and relating tags and categories throughout the site.

The site is bilingual - its available in American and UK english. This functionality is provided by translating on the fly the controversial spelling differences between the 2 similar tongues, this means that neither country have to suffer the others sometimes odd spelling.

I was also involved in the creation of a dealer locater system which plots local and national antique dealers on a Google map, this system works globally and provides locations in several countries.

I built the Micros-Fidelio OWS SOAP client integration for the portmeirion village that allows the sites booking system to hook directly into their back office systems to make reservations, create user profiles and check availability of rooms all within a few clicks.

The site uses a bespoke and simple gallery widget to show pictures of each room and property within the portmeirion village, hotel and castle.

Visit Llandudno is a tourist site, providing information to prospective visitors to the area, the site manages several thousand accommodation, attraction and events and presents it in a visually pleasing and easy to access manner.

The site is fully bilingual presenting all its information in both english and welsh. Providing a easy to manage system to maintain this data data proved the toughest part of this project. The site provides detailed information on each of the accommodation's and attractions and uses VW and AA ratings to provide reliable information on gradings.

Update:
The site has been upgraded with new features added, rebranding and an improved user interface to help visitors get more from the site more easily.

Website for visitors to the Wye Valley, all the way through East Wales.
This site was designed to make more accessible the details of the Wye Valley Walk as set of materials which provide details to walks, cyclists and tourists hoping to see the most of the Wye valley.

The site provides several methods of viewing data on the route, including accommodation and attraction listings, but the most useful part of the site is the interactive mapping.

The maps plot the route of the recognised wye valley walk through wales from its source down to where it meets the sea. Each stage of the walk has its own section of map. The maps allow users to display multiple type of location at once overlaying them on the map, and viewing details dynamically along side the map.

The site is bilingually available in welsh and english including the interactive maps system.

Update: We just received a user review:

'That site is by far the best I have ever seen for a walking trail. TERRIFIC!'

Quite a positive one!