Duffy Loves

Duffy has just completed the website design for Assisi’s Memorial Bear Kitchen to assist helping build a kitchen to prepare food for the Moon Bears that are rescued from Bear Bile farms in China.

A very, very worthy cause. They need just another $73,000 for the kitchen, in conjunction with the SPCA us kiwi’s are on a mission to gather funds for the kitchen.

I went along to recently to hear Jill Robinson, the lady behind Animals Asia, who is making it all happen, and things are really changing over in China to close down these farms. So that is great news!

Bear bile has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and has resulted in thousands of bear farms in Asia where bears spend their lives in cages barely large enough for them to move in where they’re milked for their bile through a catheter, or a permanent hole in the abdomen that bile drips out of.

There are officially about 7,000 bear farms in China, but groups suspect the actual number to be higher. The World Society for the Protection of Animals estimates that approximately 12,000 bears are currently suffering on bear farms around Asia, with an estimated 16,000 left in the wild, who are considered an endangered species.

The active ingredient in bear bile, UDCA, can be synthetically created without the use of animals. Additionally, a report by the Chinese Association of Medicine and Philosophy and EarthCare has established that there are at least 54 herbal alternatives to bear bile, including Chinese ivy stem, dandelion, chrysanthemum, common sage and rhubarb. The alternatives are both cheap and effective, according to Animals Asia.

Animals Asia have a great number of doctors and a huge amount of extensive research to prove that the bears that the bile has been extracted from have and die from liver cancer, so any product often non-essential, non-TCM products such as toothpaste, wine, shampoo and power drinks, that contains Bear Bile can make humans get liver cancer too, need I say more…

www.bearkitchen.org.nz

Duffy has just completed the website design for one of Auckland’s leading businesses in the Transport Warehousing and 3rd Party Logistics industry Carroll’s.

The design objective:
- To communicate the history of Carroll’s, a family business with an outstanding reputation
- To let the staff ‘speak’ about their ‘love for their jobs’, hence why they have been with the Carroll’s for decades.
- Use pictures to visually communicate ‘what they do’ in an interesting way (‘Pictures say 1000 words‘)
- Highlight the ease of working with Carroll’s, that working with Carroll’s is ‘easy’, ‘they go the extra mile’, because working with Carroll’s you are working with and are part of a ‘family’.

www.carrolls.co.nz

“Duffy Design was referred to me by two other companies we have dealings with. Belinda has just completed our new website and I cannot speak highly enough of her. The end result is exactly what we were looking for. We are a Transport Warehousing Company and when we started on this project we knew the direction and feel we wanted. Belinda clearly listened, she went about understanding what we do, how we do it and why we are different. I feel this was the key and coupled with her great design ability, we received a website that doesn’t look like it has come off a factory production line. Belinda thankyou for all your patience with me.”
Chris Carroll

Duffy has just completed the website for Self Drive Holidays New Zealand.

“Belinda Duffy has been fantastic to deal with right from the start. She has designed & project managed our website www.selfdriveholidaysnz.com along with the branding for our stationery. She has thought outside the square to come up with a professional, fresh & easy way for people to have their holidays arranged for them. Her knowledge on all things design and web related is incredible.

Belinda has a fantastic eye for detail and has been great to deal with by email, phone and in person.  She really wants to see her clients succeed which is fantastic. Thanks Belinda!”
Cam Potts, Founder, Self Drive Holidays New Zealand

A year-long project complete!

This project utilised the whole toolkit of services we offer at Duffy.

Keyword Research for online companies:
It was really important for this business to have a great domain name ‘packed’ with keyword clients search for to find ‘Self-Drive Holidays’. In-depth keyword research was done to see what US, UK and Australians search for to find ‘Self Drive Holidays’.

From this research the domain name www.selfdriveholidaysnz.com was chosen as it cleverly contains several search terms. We also recommended an abbreviated name also www.sdhnz.com for ease of people typing in the domain name.

Branding:
Duffy created the branding for SDHNZ based a stylised steering wheel, that reads cleverly also as a mountain range and koru design. The brand was simply executed in Black and White (a key NZ palette) to ‘stand off’ the stunning images sitting behind it on the website and print collateral.

Website Strategy + Design:

This website was no ‘walk in the park’ project! The site is all custom designed page by page and custom-coded.

Duffy doesn’t use ‘out-of-the-box’ CMS (content management systems), sites like this and the majority of large sites we work on – they just don’t fit the mould. So we make the mould to fit the site.

This site cleverly holds all the ‘Things to Do’ and ‘Places to See’ in a database, allowing the client to create custom holidays that detect when he chooses a region a selection of things and places to see so creating holidays for him is easy.

We also used Google maps and coordinateas to automatically build this holiday maps.

The result a very clever website that works for the client, that he has total control of moving forward.

www.selfdriveholidaysnz.com