After a few delays (setting up  a business in France is always a pain), our friends picked up the keys to their shop yesterday. Funky Foods will be opening for the winter season this year after an extensive re-fit (the shop used to be a hairdressers).

I'm glad to say that Listingslab Productions will be doing the Funky Food Chamonix website and in my excitement I have even come up with a logo. A proper designer will be working on the brand in the coming months, but it's a start.

I'm stoked about this venture and happy to be involved as the web-geezer. I've been building up a portfolio of Chamonix based websites for a while now. I'm developing an Internet Marketing Service at the moment. I'm using free open source technologies such as Drupal and wordPress to rapidly create effective marketing sites for small businesses at a very low cost. It's a business model referred to as Professional Open Source, and the initial research and development has shown great results.

Here's a short list of some of the Chamonix Valley based websites we are currently running our beta service on:

Le Delice Restaurant
All Mountain Performance
The Savoy Bar
Alpine Ski And Golf
Chamofix

The aim is to be adding to this list over the summer. We want to remove the cost barrier to creating a small business website in the first place and instead create long-term marketing partnerships with these companies.

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We tried it with Best-Of-Vimeo.com, and it seems to work very well. After only 6 months, we have an ever increaing number of visitors, and generate much traiffic to the Listingslab Productions website.

Best-Of-Vimeo.com

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www.listingslab-productions.eu

I'm going to be going in a different direction with the mothership URL, www.listingslab.com. So I've created a whole new domain for the Listingslab Productions website.

The .eu domain lets people know that it's a European company, not a UK one, and the purpose of the site is to find the kind of clients that I'd like to work with. It's a site which can grow and develop. A mash up between Drupal and Flash. it has equal emphasis on being well set up for Internet Marketing (SEO) and clean delivery of information and design to real people who might actually look at it to see if Listingslab know what they're talking about.

Hopefully it shows that even though I live in some little village up in mountains, I can still do you a good website and probably a lot cheaper than those London chaps too!

It's a long time since I've had my own business website that is good enough to start promoting. There's still a lot of work to be done with editing the content of the site, but that's easy with drupal. I'm rather proud of it. I always think my last work was my best. I guess when I stop thinking that, then I'll stop making websites.

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