You can visit the Hellas Cheerleading Union Website

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

We are continuing to enrich our portfolio by uploading photographs in Photodune and a second item in logos. We are expecting photographs to be approved very soon. The first batch of photographs will be about “Cyclades”

What is CodeGuard? It’s is a Simple Time Machine for your Website!

Techcrunch wrote about

At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last May, the unanimous winner of the “Audience Choice” award was a young, Atlanta-based startup called CodeGuard. The startup caught the audience’s attention based on a simple value proposition: To become a “time machine for your website.” In other words, CodeGuard’s free service allows any site owner to back up their website and revert to earlier versions, while monitoring for infections.

After months of tweaking and beta testing, today CodeGuard is officially pulling back the curtain on a new-and-improved service, backed by a fresh $1.3 million in funding from Imlay Investments and a host of angel investors, including Palaniswamy Rajan, Bert Ellis, Tom Noonan, Matt Chanoff, and Merrick Furst.

What do you gain as a Sentel client, with CodeGuard?

• Your website is backed up on a scheduled basis (hourly, daily, weekly) based on your needs
• Encrypted Website and Database backups of files
• Website Restores are Fast, Reliable, and One Click Away
  CodeGuard offers users multiple restore options. We provide automatic FTP and MySQL restores with the click of a button, but also give you the opportunity to backup your files manually. We just send you a zip of any backup version you request and you’ll receive it by email!
• 2 Gigabytes of Storage
• Daily Monitoring and Change Notification Alerts
  CodeGuard is constantly checking your website for changes, and we notify you when we see them. A malicious attack against your website’s files would instantly be presented to you with our daily monitoring and email notifications. You can see the changes that are happening on your site and keep track of versions you’ve made through the dashboard.

Using CodeGuard and CloudFlare services we make sure your website has the best possible protection.

On June 20th I was invited in the latest Google Engage seminar in Greece, as Sentel is part of the Engage network. The seminar was held in Gazarte, a nice art venue in Gazi, Athens. Despite the hot temperature, quite a few people was there. The ratio was 60-40 (designers/devs VS marketeers).

What is Google Engage?

The Seminar

In general I think this seminar was mostly for non-marketing people. The speakers talked about basic principles of a client meeting and on how to maintain a business relationship.

The main speaker was Ariel Hochstadt an online enterpreneur, author and founder of Symbolicom. After a couple of a bit boring sessions, Ariel began talking about The Hallo Effect. Basic stuff there, but his speech was quite uplifting and i have to say I enjoyed him a lot.

Coffee break and time to networking with other Google fellas there. I met some old friends there and talked with some new ones as well.

The second part of the seminar was about client relationship. How to start, impress, understand him, stand the test of time and finally take it to the next level. I have to say that Ariel’s presentation was to the point and kept me focused.

At the end of the seminar (about 14.00) I had a nice morning with fellow web people, in an event held by Google, plus a goodie bag!

Photostory

You can find all the photos from the official Google Engage Greece Picasa account

Let’s face the fact that administrative tasks are much more time consuming than you imagine. The problem gets bigger as the clients and websites lists, I need to maintain get bigger and bigger.

I still remember old times where backing up websites and assets were pain in the ass. Burning and filing CDs (yeah, do you remember them???) was a total waste of time and money. Now I praise the lord for the tools I have available and make my life easier as a webmaster (sic). If you are interested in the tools and services I use in Sentel to keep my mind sane, I will quickly name the most important: WPRemote (for keeping websites up to date), Dropbox (for storing everything – and by everything, I mean EVERYTHING) and CloudFlare (for taking some of the bandwidth and attack pain away). I will talk more on how Sentel takes advantage of these services in another post.

Although there are these wonderful tools which let me have some peace of mind, there are times, things are getting wild and some tasks are left behind. Some updates need more care because of huge code changes, some auto backups missed schedule (always happen) etc.

These are some of the reasons, we dedicate the first days of July, October, January and April, to prioritize updates and backups. Our goal, during maintenance days, is to have every website we manage and its plugins updated to the latest version. Also we make sure our backup log works correctly, renew the domains that will expire in the next 4 months and re-organize the client assets in our dropbox account.

I see these days as a checkpoint, where I draw a line and say “Until here everything is happy, now i have the 4 next months to mess things up!”
Probably I am the kind of person that needs to summarize things from time to time. I think I work better this way.

Circles Disturbed is the first international, research book that examines the relationship of mathematics and narration. The custody belongs to the author and mathematician Apostolos Doxiadis and the American mathematician, professor at Harvard, Barry Mazur.

Anyone can attend the event live online at: Thales + Friends website

Thales + Friends is a not-for-profit organization, based in Greece, that works to bridge the chasm between mathematics and other forms of cultural activity.

Circles Disturbed is the first international, research book that examines the relationship of mathematics and narration. The custody belongs to the author and mathematician Apostolos Doxiadis and the American mathematician, professor at Harvard, Barry Mazur.

Anyone can attend the event live online at: Thales + Friends website

Thales + Friends is a not-for-profit organization, based in Greece, that works to bridge the chasm between mathematics and other forms of cultural activity.