If you have been watching the news you will have seen we have been battered by the strongest winds of the season so far. This week in Orkney, where Copla is busy working on exciting web products, we’ve been snug indoors while severe gales raged outside.
Power was lost to hundreds of homes and the radio transmitter sitting on top of one of our hills was struck dumb by lightning. Swells and strong tides whipped up by the severe gales means ferries between some of the islands and to mainland Scotland were cancelled.
Luckily for us, even though we are based on a small Orkney island, we have been more sheltered than most; sitting it out off Kirkwall Harbour. Our ferry bravely plied the waves today to bring engineers to us to restore our electricity supply. One of the other Orkney isles wasn’t quite so lucky. People on South Walls are normally joined on to Hoy by a causeway but last night the gales, which reached 138mph near Kirkwall, destroyed the road.
But we had no newspapers delivered to the isles as the battering winds stopped the boats from mainland Scotland.
The winds have eased a little now but we now have blizzards and driving hail. And the storms are forecast to give us another battering on Tuesday.
At Copla we do have back-up plans if the power goes off. Our experts won’t be held back on their projects.
Of course we expect to have winter weather up here in Orkney but it’s still not much fun when we get a battering. Certainly the first two thirds of November were very warm with flowers still blooming and birds getting confused and building nests or turning up unexpectedly when they should be further south. They must surely have got the message now with the stormy blast that they were being a bit premature. Since then we have had three bouts of severe gales – measuring hurricane force.
Today Copla had a visit from members of the Highlands and Islands Enterprise board of directors and senior managers. They took the small ferry from Kirkwall on mainland Orkney to our little isle of Shapinsay.
It was great to have the chance to talk to our visitors about the opportunities and challenges facing a very rural IT company.
Copla is a perfect example of the type of business that HIE supports across the region. We relocated our successful software house, specialising in high end web products and video systems, from the south of England to Orkney.
In Orkney we have discovered our creativity can flourish. And we help increase the economy of the remote islands by offering new jobs, developing skills and helping to promote other businesses through our services. This is all in line with HIE’s ethos of strengthening communities.
Our experiences will help HIE tailor its services to companies facing similar challenges and improve advice to start-up businesses in the Highlands and Islands.
HIE is the Scottish Government’s economic and community development agency for the north and west of Scotland and its aim is to generate sustainable economic growth in every part of the Highlands and Islands, HIE wants to attract more businesses like ours to move here, invest and grow.
At Copla we are proud to have developed the HIE funded Orkney.com website. This aims to attract more businesses to work in our beautiful part of the world and connect existing Orkney based companies, traders and organisations.
We are currently looking to expand our team by hiring experienced staff. Specifically we are looking for:
Graphic Designer
Java Developer
Project Manager
Experience is more important to us that qualifications and we’re looking for people with a real passion for their trade.
The jobs will be based at our office in Shapinsay and the perks of the job include a free lunch and beautiful views.
Today we’ve launched our new website.
The old design was just a stop gap so that we had a presence on the web, but wasn’t anything to write home about. So it’s quite an exciting thing for us to have our new one up.
I decided not to use flash, as I really want this website to look the best it can to all our visitors, so I’ve tried to create something really quite original within the
boundaries of CSS.
I’ve got a lot of my inspiration for the new site from a collection of ribbons I’ve been gathering over the past few months, all different shades of pink and red and different opacities, so they layer wonderfully. Also I’ve been thinking a lot lately about neon lighting tubes and the way they seem to give everything around them a coloured glow, they can be such a portent of excitement.
I’ve used some effects on our logo so that it really stands out and seems to glow, hopefully I’ve managed to convey some of the neon excitement with this.
The other main challenge, apart from design, was Information architecture; making sure the content got our message across without being endless. I’ve stripped all unnecessary words away and left bite-sized information chunks, it makes it easy for the reader to select what they want to read.
I’m sure they’ll be lots of little tweaks in the weeks to come, a pixel here or there can make a lot of difference, you know!
We are very happy to have Simeon join the copla team. Simeon brings a wealth of media and project experience to copla.
Copla has recently moved from Rousay to Shapinsay.
Whilst we did love the island of Rousay, there was no office accommodation to fit our growing business. We have therefore upped sticks and moved to Shapinsay.
Shapinsay is a lovely island, with amazing sea views around every corner and a direct ferry 6 times a day into Kirkwall.
We hope to get along well with our new neighbours, who just happen to be cows.
We are very pleased to have Chris join the copla team as a software developer. Chris has extensive experience in building robust server side software.
Chris will be focusing on our mission critical server systems ensuring that we continue to give our customers the best possible service.
Today we’ve launched our new website.
The old design was just a stop gap so that we had a presence on the web, but wasn’t anything to write home about. So it’s quite an exciting thing for us to have our new one up.
I decided not to use flash, as I really want this website to look the best it can to all our visitors, so I’ve tried to create something really quite original within the boundaries of CSS.
I’ve got a lot of my inspiration for the new site from a collection of ribbons I’ve been gathering over the past few months, all different shades of pink and red and different opacities, so they layer wonderfully. Also I’ve been thinking a lot lately about neon lighting tubes and the way they seem to give everything around them a coloured glow, they can be such a portent of excitement.
I’ve used some effects on our logo so that it really stands out and seems to glow, hopefully I’ve managed to convey some of the neon excitement with this.
The other main challenge, apart from design, was Information architecture; making sure the content got our message across without being endless. I’ve stripped all unnecessary words away and left bite-sized information chunks, it makes it easy for the reader to select what they want to read.
I’m sure they’ll be lots of little tweaks in the weeks to come, a pixel here or there can make a lot of difference, you know!