In praise of one of Grapevine's regular advertisers, we would like to express our delight with the results that Russell Hogg of local web design firm ‘Hogtronix’ has achieved with our new web site at http://www.iberacal.com.

It really is a credit to him. In February we contracted Hogtronix to effectively merge three web sites - one for a small charitable Trust based in the north of Scotland, one for our accommodation, and the other for the Caithness & Sutherland Walking Festival. The latter is now the only one which is ‘stand alone’ but it is still nevertheless connected to the new site by way of hyperlinks.

The challenge was to integrate the sites and get them running within four weeks, and also to integrate our Spanish accommodation and new business into the site, as well as having an on-line booking facility and downloadable (is there such a word?!) publications.

A tall order - especially as Russ was due to go to the UK for three of the four weeks! All I had to do was produce the text and photos for the site and Hogtronix would do the rest. He rose to the challenge like the trooper that he is and now the delights of northern Scotland and southern Spain are displayed in all their glory. Russell even tweaked some of the text so it would flow, despite never having been to Scotland. The result is a clean, fresh, navigable site with which the search engines are having a field day (Russell specialises in Search Engine Optimisation for websites).

The website also provides all sorts of statistical data for us which tells us what people have been looking for (and if they found it!), their country of origin, time spent on our website etc. This data is updated by the minute, 24 hours a day!
This is just one example of how technology can be used for international working – Russell's programmers are based in Romania, the web server is in the USA and our business is in Scotland. All this driven from our bases in Southern Spain! Truly Caledonian Iberian ConeXions!