Safco-Fish.GE First Fish Blog in Georgia

At the start of January 2015 I was contacted by a locally living foreigner, originally coming from South Africa doing some fish business in Republic of Georgia, after a brief conversation via e-mails we agreed to meet each other and I insisted I would love to see those fish ponds he is working for. Well I just like things like that. I once even visited a dairy farm here in Georgia and made some nice looking photos of cows.

Shortly we arranged a sightseeing tour. Read: South African Fish farms in Georgia and our friendship started. Soon afterwards we started to hang out, did some hiking tour. Read More: Hiking in Birtvisi. Johann (Production manager at these fish farms) guided me how to use DSRL camera as it turns out he is a photo geek. In brief - our friendship started.

I was asked could I help them out to I build a simple website for their company needs. I agreed and decided to use a minimum viable product approach in this case. So I took Drupal (I'm a Drupaller) and built a really minimal website with focus on High Quality Images (Remember manager both of fish farms and now the website is a photo geek - so it's not a problem to have a high quality photos). We agreed to build a simple website with a basic sections, like about us, contact us and to feature a blog on this website. 

After a few days a first Fish Blog in Georgia were born  - meet www.safco-fish.ge

Safco-Fish.GE Front page

Safco-Fish.GE Front page

The recipe for this site was pretty simple - Drupal as a framwork, Responsive Bootstrap sub theme (Clean Business) and a few additional modules to make site more social and seo friendly, for example, pathauto for pretty urls, metatag for Open Graph support e.t.c.

Safco-Fish.GE Responsive website

Safco-Fish.GE Responsive website

Safco-Fish.ge is a fully responsive website built on Drupal and Bootstrap

Embedded and Responsive videos

Embedded Video

Embedded Video

Johann told me that he would love to feature videos on this website and I come out with a simple, but yet effective solution to actually store (upload) videos on YouTube and embed them using custom WYSIWYG text editor by just pasting embed code. I did applied some CSS rules to make this video work on mobile devices as well.

Third Party Comment system

Disqus comment form

Disqus comment form

At this stage we understood this website needs to have a good comment system as well - again I had a few options, to stick with Drupal Out Of Box comment system or to use some third party solution. I chose second option and decided go with Disqus since I have been using it on some other projects and hadn't experienced yet any problems with it.

Social share buttons

Another thing a decent blog should have nowadays is a social share buttons

Social share buttons

Social share buttons

For social share buttons I used Drupal views, injected some JavaScript to theme files and in combination with MetaTag module they does wonderful things when shared.

Quote from client

I contacted Johann and asked for a brief reference quote, and here is what I got in reply, since I'm calling him a true friend of mine, his review might been not a very objective, but anyway here is what he told me:

"I have only appreciation for what Reinis Fischer is able to do. He is a true master. Fast, Efficient and Reliable. I have seen his skill and passion and I am blown away. Thank you Reinis Fischer you rock!"

Johann Kritzinger Production Manager 

About Safco LTD

Safco is a company in Georgia that currently owns 50 ha of dams near Sagarejo. The company was formed by a number of South African investors who were interested in diversifying outside South Africa and found Georgia as an exciting oppurtunity.

The property was bought at the end of 2012. With the help of local expertise these dams were stocked with carp for the local market. The dams available to Safco is not limited to the ones it currently owns. There is a further 8 dams that forms part of the infrastructure that can be rented as required.

Learn more: www.safco-fish.ge