The last few days I have been busy behind the scenes with a few new projects. A particular project that has been on ice for some time now is Eskhaleni Technologies. Eskhaleni is a company fully owned by my wife, established in early 2007. The company has been kept low profile, and has a small set of clients who are provided various development and financial services. When the company originally started I created a very simple design and haven’t looked at it since.

The middle of last year I designed a new company logo. I was playing around with an idea in Adobe Illustrator and happened to come across a design that I felt looked good and my wife also approved of. The company name is a derivative of a Zulu word that means space, and with the focus being on small companies and start-ups, the idea of a globe as the centre piece and the use of some earth tone colouring made sense. I am no graphics designer by any stretch of the imagination but the final design worked well and it was quickly adopted on internal documentation. About a week ago I decided it is time to upgrade the site and start working on a proper web interface for the company, as well as starting a new website in the process.

The website layout is simple with focus on content. The most important part of the layout is the logo, and I will admit there is nothing impressive done with the rest of the design. The top bar contains the company slogan and a text link menu bar, currently pointing to the two major search engines Google and Bing on the static pages and domain placeholders. The bottom of the site contains links to the the Microsoft BizSpark and WebsiteSpark programs, as Eskhaleni is part of both these programs.

I am extremely excited about the new website. It is being developed using ASP.Net MVC 2 which is currently in preview, and the areas feature is something I have been looking forward too since it’s announcement. The site will be developed to provide some much needed automation for processes both internal as well as to clients. It is not often that I get to work on a project I have complete control over, and this is definitely going to be a good and positive learning curve.