Riyactive Media - Design and Photography

Meadowvale Optometry (meadowvaleoptometry.ca) is one of my newest releases and focuses on Optometry. They are a business located in Mississauga with a beautifully designed store with very friendly service and very trendy frames. I haven't seen many Optomotrists with very nice sites in Mississauga so I really wanted to make this one special. I originally went to get an eye exam done with my Mom and struck up a conversation with Dr Gill, who at the time was interested in getting a website made for his new business. We worked together and tried to make the website perfect for them and visitors to the site. Check out Mississauga Optometrists.

I saw this video - had to share!

Auto Tuning from Casey Donahue on Vimeo.

I only recently discovered Vimeo - its an incredible site where video amateurs and professionals come together to share their work. Also, check out stuff by StillMotion!

 

I'd like to introduce two sites that have been launched this week - Payal Banquet Hall and High On Heels.

Payal Banquet Hall had a site that was built a while back and needed a facelift. I was told be the owner that he got visitors asking all sorts of questions about information that wasn't available on the previous site. He really wanted the website to convery the hall as a grande convention centre - which it is. Well, its a completely new and bold look which hopefully fulfills all the requests they were getting by any visitors.

 

High on Heels - This place is special in that it is the first South Asian shoe store! The store itself is beautiful and the owner went to great lengths to make the place look its best. Its located in Malton, at the Great Punjab Center  - definitely worth a visit!

Pictures of the Grand opening coming soon!

 

When there is a lot of information on a page or a giant table – it’s nice to have a search function on there that just searches the page – quickly eliminating irrelevant information. It’s also nice when the page doesn’t refresh every time either. Page refreshes have to be the most annoying thing about the internet… among other things. No, pagination (splitting data up in several pages) isn’t good enough at times. Usability studies show that having a scoped search where it’s needed can be very helpful for visitors.

This past weekend was the 2009 Suhaag Bridal Show. This year, was by far the busiest I’ve ever seen the Congress Centre.  As usual, I took my camera and snapped a lot of pictures – this time they asked me be the official photographer (Thanks Gautam!). This gave me the opportunity to meet all of the vendors in the show and take some well positioned shots at the fashion show.

It was a lot of fun working with Mandy and Sheila with their Khazana Creations booth – I helped setup the whole booth the day before and spoke to some potential clients on the day of the show when things got really busy. It was also really good to see Gautam and Sanjay running around and making sure all the vendors were ok.

Here are some of my favourite pics from the show:

Above outfit by Jamayz

Full collection of Suhaag images

Mandy (my wife) and I are back from our 15 day trip to Singapore, Thailand and England! We had a great time and visited some great places. I like to take advantage of these places and really check out the culture and try all the food selection - My wife is not one who enjoys authentic cuisine especially when its served on the street. Princess needs a nice, clean restaurant with nice presentation. We found a mix of both pretty much everywhere we went satisfying both our appetites.

Singapore
We've all heard how clean it is and how you can't chew gum yada yada yada... To see it for yourself is another thing. Singapore is beautiful. There are giant trees covering the roads, exotic flowers at every street corner and fresh juice stands everywhere. There are authentic Chinese, Malaysian (mmmm Satay with peanut sauce), Indian restaurants all over the place. All this does come a price though - Singapore is an expensive place to visit! There are shopping malls almost everywhere - the main district being on orchard road and home to top designer stuff.

We stayed at the Swissotel which overlooked the marina - stunning view at day or night!

Singapore is made of 4 main cultures - Malaysian, Chinese, Indian and Euro-Asian ( I learned this on the hippo tours bus tour guide). If you visit I definitely recommend the bus tours!

Some great sights:

• Botanical Gardens
• Night Safari
• Orchard Road
• Little India, Little China
• Clark Quay - great atmosphere and nightlife
• Sentosa Island
• Long Bar (try the Singapore Sling)

Thailand
Okay... So its not as clean as Singapore but it is very beautiful and so much fun! Everything is quite inexpensive (anything would seem cheap after Singapore by the way) There are so many markets and malls to buy almost anything ( Mandy was going crazy).

For shopping, We visited the

• Mbk mall
  
• Night market - Suam lum
  
• Semp pang - wholesale market,
  
• Jut Jat market,
  
• Pratunam markets.

Some sights we checked out

• Grand Palace
• Wat Arun
• The river (good way to get from place to place)
• Little India (yep, we're everywhere)

We arrived in Thailand at midnight and on the way to our hotel(Lebua at State Tower) we were already a little apprehensive about the whole political situation in Bangkok. As the taxi reached close to our hotel we went through what looked like some scary alleys that made us even more scared. Finally, out of nowhere the taxi pulls up to this gigantic entrance which was very well lit up - we took a sigh of relief. For the next two days we took a taxi straight from the hotel to anywhere we needed to go. Even in the daylight our 'neighborhood' seemed a little creepy. Feeling a little daring the third day we stepped out and found that is wasn't so bad after all. There were tourist everywhere! The only people that really bother you may be the taxi or tuk tuk drivers - but you can just ignore them!

Anywhere you go - try a Thai Massage!!!

Pattaya
The one day we decide to go to the beach is the only day it rains! When it rains in Thailand - it rains hard! It sure did ruin our plans to relax on the beach but we made the best of it!

 

England

If there's any one place a person should visit - its England!

Well, we had an awesome time but we're happy to be back. There definitely is no place like home!

Here's all the pics, Enjoy!

 

The last post was quite a while ago... why so long between posts? Well, I was in the midst of re-designing the entire site when I had a run-in with a hacker. Yes, the entire site was hacked. Since I was in the middle of the design - I wasn't paying too much attention to security (I know, I know... no excuses).

Anyways, as you can see - the site is up again and in full effect. Since this attack I've completely changed my work flow (New Development server, backup process and security management).

What I wanted to do before all this happened was talk about the pictures I took at the 2008 Suhaag Fashion show. Here's some of my favourites.

I had a blast! The entire album can be seen here.

Well, I never thought I''d be one of them people that "blog". Really, I thought they were all nerds! Being a web designer, I really should be doing this, and I''m pretty cool anyways ;). I visit about 20 blogs a day, and these are written by some truly inspirational people (cool). Besides, its a really good way to keep a journal of events and everyday happenings. Also, I take so many pictures - all of them end up on my hard drive somewhere. Recently, I've been very good with printing them out and giving them to people but this will be another really easy way to share my work. Not to mention - I need something to do on the train ride to work!

So here it goes... My first blog post.

This past weekend was a very eventful one. Starting with most importantly a new member of our family. He doesn''t have a name yet, but he''s really cute.


Also, this weekend was the Suhaag wedding show! Mandy had a booth for Khazana Creations. I also got a great chance to shoot some pics of the fashion show - Will be posted soon!

Last but not least - I completed a new custon website for Jamayz. It was a quick 2 week project which needed to be done for the show. I think it looks fantastic and Gul (the client) seems to be very happy with it - its a Riyactive design! I also did a photoshoot for them - the pics are all used on the site. Jamayz.com