Photo: Vladimir Grygorenko

Over the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of overhauling Vladimir Grygorenko’s Iconography website. Vladimir is an accomplished world class Orthodox Iconographer who came to the United States to paint St. Seraphim’s Cathedral in Dallas, Tx. Since his time in the US he has painted many icons and churches including my own church Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church in Bixby, Ok.

Vladimir is a joy to work with and his work (murals here) is simply stunning. Not only is encountering his work inspirational it is a deeply spiritual and prayerful experience. It has been a joy to worship in a church filled with Vladimir’s work and now it has been a joy to design his new website.

Please check out the before and after screenshots below and visit his new website at www.orthodox-icon.com.

Today, Negnet Solutions released the newest iteration of the Augustine Christian Academy website. ACA is a christian classical school located in Tulsa, Oklahoma that aims to reclaim the American culture for Christ. The school offers a wide variety of strong academic classes and activities taught by a very talented and experienced staff. ACA is not only a wonderful school, but a necessity for the continuance of our civilized culture.

Please check out the school’s new website at www.acatulsa.org. Also check out the before and after screenshots below.

Today Negnet Solutions is proud to announce the newly redesigned Spa Lux day spa website-www.spalux.org. Spa Lux is a world class day spa located in Tulsa, Ok. They have a wide variety of treatments and their facility is truly amazing. (In fact I highly recommend their sauna and steam room.)

Yet despite their amazing facility and treatments, their website was a little lacking-especially in navigation and interface design. Negnet Solutions set out to create a website that would not only capture the essence of the spa, but do it in such a way that the new site would be easy and intuitive to navigate.

Thus we are proud to announce the completion of our work. Check out the images comparing the old site with the new below, visit www.spalux.org, and please tell us what you think in the comments below!

This week I have finally come to my wits end with regards to Media Temple. Their grid server promises fantastic performance with a very easy to use gui to boot. Unfortunately their performance is truly only hype. In the real world the grid performs very poorly. Often my websites can take up to 8-10 seconds between each page load. Even more, I have spent countless hours improving performance on all of my software in an attempt to make my sites load more quickly.

While these performance tweaks did help some, the bottom line is that the grid server is just slow. Today I started researching other grid based hosting solutions. While Mosso looked interesting, it seemed a bit over priced.

Then I found Slicehost. Slicehost is not a shared host of any kind. It is a virtual machine grid in which you buy a “dedicated” grid slice, install an OS, and build from the ground up. Not only do I no longer have to worry about whether my host’s software is compatible with my needs, I now have a host with root access!

Even more performance seems to be much better. As of now I have moved Negnetsolutions.com and Acatulsa.org onto the new slice. If performance still proves to be outstanding out over the next week or so I will move the rest of my sites over.

While I can not recommend Slicehost to everyone, it does seem like a very viable way to host for those who are tech savy.

I’ll be in touch.

Today Negnet Solutions launched a new version of Flora Organica Design’s website. Flora Organica Design is a California based floral design company that specializes in design, build, installation, and production of weddings and events. They do very beautiful and professional work in a very unique way. We are happy to announce the launch of this website partly because we think the website is fantastic but also because we think Flora Organica’s floral design taste is absolutely breathtaking.

Please check out their new website at floraorganicadesign.com.