When we bought our house back in 2003 it had a fairly typical wood & concrete garage.   It was old and shabby, but we put in some shelving and worktop to make it more useful.  Then, in the Winter of 2007/08, it finally started to give in to the elements — the roof was leaking badly and the wooden front started to fall to bits.   It was time for a replacement.  However, we decided to make do until the other work was completed on the garden, driveway and house interior.

Now that the house is pretty much finished, it’s garage time!

I’ve decided to go for a wooden garage this time.  I’m using wood for a number of reasons: flexibily of design, warmth, ease of installing insulation and attractiveness to name just a few.   And since I don’t need the garage to store my car (who could be bothered with the fuss?) I’ve decided to build a garage with an internal partition, giving me a ‘garage’ side for my scooter and a summer house side for hanging out in.  Here’s the design I’ve come up with…

Read on after the jump for more pics and details…

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The new version of s1jobs has won the Online Excellence category at the prestigious Marketing Society Star Awards in Glasgow.   The site, which was designed and built by my technical team last year, beat strong competition from Blonde, BigMouthMedia, Story UK and Whitespace to take the award.  

The win recognises the talent and dedication of everyone involved in the build.  It was a real team effort with sales and marketing staff playing a key role in the design and development process.   Full credit to everyone involved in the build, especially Colin Clark and David McLaughlin who did the majority of the design, HTML and programming work on the project. 

David Craik, Head of Marketing for s1 accepting the award

It seems one of the key factors in ’s1jobs 2.0′ winning the category was the measurable effectiveness of the new site.   The improved job seeker interface — including a personalised homepage, improved job alerts and AJAX-powered search results — combined with an improved recruiter offering — JobCasts, personalised CRM, and automatic applicant screening — led to a direct improvement in all our key metrics.  Visitor numbers were up, the average application rate soared while the number of page impressions actually decreased*.   

* While a drop in page impressions would be bad news for some sites it isn’t an issue for s1jobs, which generates revenue through job listings.   A drop in page impressions (coupled with an increase in applications) simply means users are getting to the content they want more easily — a great result.