Our new website

This is the second website we’ve built for Sonika Studios Inc. and this one is a big  improvement from the last one. We’ve trimmed out the long text, simplified it, and made it more about the visuals and our clientele – after all that’s what really tells you what we’re capable of, and what we can offer you.

Key features of our new site:

• jQuery – we eliminated all needs for flash animation by using advanced jQuery animation. This ensures that our site looks and works gorgeously on all platforms, including the iPad and iPhone and all computers.
• Bigger photos – our portfolio items and artwork are displayed in much larger visuals.
• Social Media – we’ve incorporated some of the most advanced social media integration methods for Facebook & Twitter integration.

We would like to extend our thanks to all of our clients, both newer and older (and future ones) for growing with us in the past 5 years.

You can find us on Facebook at our company page, and also follow us on Twitter through @sonikastudios.

We will bring a fresh new vibe to the industry. Out with the old designs with too much clutter, lines, and boxes. In with our new designs that are clean, simple, elegant, user-friendly, and never gets old! Blend this with amazing functionality and cross-browser friendliness, and we can provide you with an excellent solution for your realtor websites.

Brixwork for Realtors features:

• Unlimited listings, and photos (as much as your web hosting account can physically hold!)
• An affordable monthly rate of $50 (plus applicable taxes)
• Easy to use listing updating system with tabs for easy navigation
• Built-in image cropper for precise thumbnail cutting
• AJAX-based user interface means faster, more intuitive navigation and control
• Video tour, PDF feature sheet, Floorplans uploadable
• Built-in Google Maps for showing the precise location of the listing, as well as streetview, and driving directions

By March, we will be offering free trials of the websites to feature our beautiful templates. Below are some screenshots of the back-end that our clients will enjoy.

Brixwork Product List

Brixwork Edit Window

#1701 – 388 Drake Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 6A8

Our office is slightly larger as the new suite’s renovation has removed some of the dividing walls. We will resume regular service by Tuesday December 1st after the move work and cleaning is all done. Thank you for your patience and support.

While I will be checking my emails for urgent material, and putting some time in throughout the week, there will be some slow-down to the services.

The following services will be COMPLETELY STOPPED during this week:

• Paper/Magazine ad designs (if you need something due this week, please let me know by the Saturday, which is September 19th)
• Any type of heavy development for websites
• Content management on websites
• New logos, business cards, or anything that requires lots of creativity and brain juice (I’ll be fed nothing but cold pudding for a few days)
• Phone consultations and tutorials (naturally after I have my tonsils pulled, I’d like to speak as little as possible)

If we are currently developing a website for you, I will have some HTML/CSS work continue during that week through Tanya (tanya@sonikastudios.com), so that work can continue. Any Flash Animation work will still be handled by Franco (franco@sonikastudios.com). Any minor updates on existing sites can also be handled through Tanya and Franco, depending on the nature of work.

If you need something done around that time urgently, please contact us now.

Thank you for your understanding, and I will be back at near-full force on September 28th, Monday (after I eat the largest and heaviest meal I can imagine).

- Jeff Kee, CEO of Sonika Studios Inc.

Here’s how you can win:

A. If you create a blog post on your own blog (doesn’t have to be WordPress), with a link back to this post with the handle “Vancouver Web Design Agency Sonika Studios Inc. at the WordCamp Fraser Valley” within the <a> tag, we will award you 3 entries.

B. If you tweet “@sonikastudios is presenting at the @wcfv this Saturday on WordPress for total web CMS. Win a free pass to the event at http://bit.ly/UdiDM”, we will award you 1 entry.

The contest will close at 6pm Friday (August 21st 2009).

Of course, Sonika Studios Inc. is an industry leader when it comes to applying WordPress as a CMS in order to deliver self-managed websites to clients who want them, and you can read more about how we use WordPress as a CMS here. WordPress and its plugins allow an excellent user experience for the business owner, without the headache of learning the vast complexities of other off-the-shelf CMS solutions such as Joomla or Drupal.

As a lighter alternative to our own semi-custom developed CMS platform, Brixwork, a professionally modified edition of WordPress can deliver you the results you need for a simple yet powerful CMS. Of course, if you want full-strength and a lot of custom development options, our Brixwork platform is your answer, but more than half of our website clients can sufficiently manage their sites with a WordPress system, so you could be one of them!

Wordcamp Fraser Valley is being held on August 22nd, between 9AM to 5PM, at the Surrey SFU campus. It’s near the Surrey Central Skytrain station, so either drive down, or hop on the Skytrain to get there! Tickets and other details can be found at the Wordcamp Fraser Valley Site.

We are also preparing the launch of our iCep (Custom Easy Platform). This is a revolutionary semi-custom development platform that we use to customize content options just for your website, based on your industry requirements. This platform has been implemented successfully with many different industry types, and we are proudly launching an updated version of it. Please look forward to our next blog post!

We are still finalizing our company logo. Based on feedback from clients and friends, the logo has morphed significantly, and we are very close to determining a final winner. Our website is also being completely overhauled. With all the expertise and knowledge we’ve gained, we are confident that this is our best company website ever! Built on a WordPress platform, we also incorporated jQuery and jQueryUI into our new site. These are powerful tools that we apply also to our clients’ websites.

Please keep coming back to our website as we keep adding valuable content!