Tag: Blue Ant

New Brochure

October 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

New Brochure designed by Blue Ant, picture by Matt Care

Our graphics and design partners at Blue Ant have produced for us a rather beautiful new brochure. This document has a definite quality feel, being of stiff semi-gloss paper, roughly A5 in size and printed across 12 ‘sides’ of paper summarising the Cambria, its history, its use in sail training, education and corporate and private hire, listing our objectives and contact details. I will put a pdf version of it in the News tab under ‘Current Newsletter’ for you to admire. Well done to Chairman Bruce Richardson who had a major role in layout and choice of images etc, and to the Team at Blue Ant whose artistic flair and quality production did the rest.

Colne Match 2nd!

September 9, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I am very much enjoying the most recent tweak the Blue Ant team have done to this website which is to add a piece of “Captcha” software which keeps out the spam comments. I was getting up to 40 a day offering me Viagra, glamorous underwear, training shoes and all sorts of other tosh. Also those superbly vague and non-committal “compliments” which say things like “This is a brilliant site and I love your work. You make some very interesting points and argue well….”. They are just ‘Phishing’ (as they now call it), hoping you’ll reply so that your IP address and so on can be harvested for nefarious purposes. Anyway, all gone now, so thank you very much, Anthony from Blue Ant.

Colne Fleet at Start, Picture by Dave Brooks.

I have very little so far from the Colne Match except from Dave B who notes that “Cambria performed very well at the Colne Barge Match. After a slow start due to no wind and a strong ebb tide, Cambria didn’t let go her anchor until the last possible moment. She followed the fleet out of the Colne on a shortened course, but didn’t let us down as she sailed through the fleet of ten to finish a creditable second, behind the ever reliable Edme on her home river. It was a long race but as always very spectacular. All the smacks started at 8 o’clock with the barges starting at 8.30am. Unlike most of the races the Colne is a one class race.

1st    Edme
2nd  Cambria
3rd   Edith May

Dave also supplied this lovely picture of the still sea and the entire fleet at the start, which I have been able to crop down top and bottom and use as one of my front page “Slider” pictures. If you have any equally good pictures which you think might work here, they need to get to me with all the panoramic width intact. They have to be croppable to 960 pixcels wide by 349 high, so normal high-masted barge pics or anything in portrait format cannot generally be used. Only if I can cut an interesting stripe out of the middle, would I be able to use it (the stripe) as a slider.

Intriguingly I have also had an amusing email from one “Sue” (that’s all she wrote) saying “Rumour has it that Lady of the Lea’s humane and selfless decision not to sink the committee boat may have cost her the Championship.” Please tell me more, Sue, do!

Chaotic Scenes!

June 30, 2012 /

No, the title does not refer to our ‘Go-Live’ event yesterday, which went off, as we’d expected, seamlessly. We are now all on the new site and you cannot see the old one. Many thanks to the two main ‘movers and shakers’ in this process, Sue Fielder of Open Sandwich, and Anthony Thornley of Blue Ant. You have probably by now sussed that you can comment directly on these posts through the site, rather than having to email the Secretaries. I would love your feedback, so please do comment if you have any ideas for improvements or can see any issues. I cannot promise, as they used to say on Cornflake packet competition entry forms “to enter into correspondence” with you, especially if this is taken up wholesale, but I will reply to any that I think are appropriate. You can, of course, still email the Trust using CambriaTrustSecretary@live.co.uk.

QDJP flotilla. Photo by Bruce Richardson

Meanwhile I loved this shot by Chairman Bruce Richardson of the chaotic scenes on the Thames during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant of the flotilla, I am guessing taken from the deck of Cambria. You may not be able to see this in the reduced-size reproduction I have to use on the website, but the worried expressions on the faces of the two police boat guys at the bottom of the shot, and the guys in the pilot-cutter (bottom left) as they crane their necks every which way looking for possible problems between the mad-cap boaters speaks loudly of “What have we let ourselves in for now!???” Excellent. Nice, one Bruce.

Old Cambria Trust website stats for 2012 — Old website stats screen grab

Stats from ‘old’ site

June 20, 2012 /

Readers may know that we intend to close the ‘old’ Cambria Website down and transfer from the much loved and highly respected providers (Open Sandwich Design) to the new base here, Blue Ant. This is no reflection on Open Sandwich. They have done us proud. You can see from the screen-grab today which I have taken from the old site that we have been well received there with 20 to 30 thousand hits a month (peaking at 55k for launch month last year).

We have now moved from a “Restoration” project, to an on-going business, running a barge for profit, managing a charter business and developing a shop selling Cambria-related ‘stuff’ . It has become appropriate therefore to seek a new provider and this we have found in Anthony at Blue Ant Ltd who are based in the old Pollocks “Sideways Launch” shipyard in the Upper Brents in Faversham. Their website is on http://blue-ant-design.co.uk/

This is the new Cambria Website, (http://www.cambriabargecharter.co.uk/) so you can see that we are ‘up there’ but is still under construction. You are welcome to come and have a look and please feel free to comment but the way these things work is that this ‘prototype’ version is posted for us all to play and train on till we at the Cambria Trust and the Team at Blue Ant are happy with it, and then we ‘go live’ and launch a brand new copy of the prototype site loaded with all the new stuff but also the archive files (for example my 4 years of blog) from the old provider. While the ‘Brand New Copy’ is constructed and tested, the ‘new website’ will be off air for a couple of days and you will only be able to see the old one, www.cambriatrust.org.uk .

Old website stats screen grab

This new site is planned to go live properly on 29th of this month (Friday week) and I know the Team at Blue Ant are keen to get the search-able aspects turned on so that we can be found by Google and other search engines. The hope is that everyone can find us here and will continue to read us regularly. It will be interesting to see how quickly we can get back up to the 20k and 30k figures shown here.