2012 was quite a BIG DEAL for Sentel. It was a year of few but huge changes. Let me write something that can sum up the things happened for Sentel in 2012.

Здравей България! (Hello Bulgaria!)

Let me begin with the biggest change. We opened our offices in the beautiful city of Sofia. After 7 years of our existence in Greek soil, we took the big decision to transfer our HQ to Sofia, a beautiful city in southern Europe.

Being a small team, is extremely easy to make such moves and we didn’t hesitate to make it. After 7 months being operational from Sofia, we are very glad we took this decision.

Livya and I travelled and stayed a lot to Sofia, in spring and autumn and we had a wonderful time during our stay. I can’t wait to visit Sofia again!

Design Stories

Biggest inner project! On July the 17th we did the big move from Ning platform to a self-hosted wordpress installation. MyDesignStories began as a social network, but we quickly realize that is for our visitors and us is working mostly as a inspirational blog. It was almost obvious that we need to change the look of the website to work better as an inspirational source for architects and designers out there.

Since then, we served 240.000 visitors from 181 countries and we created (after some layout changes and enhancements) a daily source for architecture and design inspiration for creative people of the world!

Marketplaces

During the second half of 2012, I tried to expand our income by submitting artwork in Envato marketplace. I have to admit that I gave it a shot, more in order to start becoming familiar with this type of marketplaces, than actually create a steady income for Sentel.

I started uploading some abandoned logo templates, that I believed they worth something and all of a sudden, one of them made 2 sales, almost immediately.

I wanted to experience the whole approval process in order to better prepare for a more steady contribution to these type of websites.

eBook Publishing

The last month (December) we started selling eBooks from one of our inner projects – mydesignstories.com

Although the preparation began a couple of months before, Stathis managed to close some deals the last month and at the second half of December we were good to go. Our publishing strategy will be divided into two parts. The first will be books published (or re-published) under the Design Stories brand, and the second … ssshhh…currently it’s a secret.

Other projects

During 2012, we were happy to launch some cool websites for our clients also. Cite Chicago restaurant, Kanali Ena of Piraeus city, Thales and Friends, Essol were some of them.

We also teamed up with Pixelgroup, to create a fabulous, one-page website, for Azure Wealth. Our work there was to take the design created in Photoshop and code it in a HTML5, responsive, full of jquery, website. We want to thank these guys for trusting us, for their project.

Hello 2013!

Our plans for the new year are BIG. We will do our first serious try to create something of our own. To create services that are managed by us. We will update you with more details soon.

I also hope to find some time and focus on my wordpress theme framework. Although it already exists, it is not refined and not as flexible and smart as I dreamt of. Of course it is used to produce some beautiful websites of our clients and of our own, but my dream is to create something complete and give it back to the wordpress community.

So this is for now, until our next update here, we would like to wish you all a
Happy and Productive Year!

- Christos, Stathis, Livya