God is in the details May 16. 074
Over the past few months I’ve been working with the team at Voyage to develop and deliver their shiny new website. On the high of having the website complete they foolishly invited me to christen it with it’s inaugural headline and tell you a little bit about the journey we’ve taken from concept to reality.
Unlike a large number of agencies out there Voyage know what they do best. They have a team with supreme creativity and they leverage those skills to provide clients with creative solutions that deliver results across a wide variety of mediums. This is what makes working with Voyage as a partner so exciting. You know that the creative solution they propose is more than likely going to challenge the norm and push you to deliver something that breaks the mould.
Working to develop a web driven solution that the Voyage team have proposed is always an enjoyable task, the more enjoyable the task is, the more involved you become in it and for that you get a much better end result. In short, everyone wins.
Right from the start Voyage were very clear about the creative approach they wanted to take with their own website; incorporating a large horizontal canvas rather than the typical ‘vertical scroll’ that we’re all used to. It was also very clear that simplicity was going to be a key factor with ‘God‘ very much being ‘in the details‘ (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe).
We faced a number of technical challenges in marrying a horizontal layout with the dynamic ‘content managed’ nature of the website. Voyage wanted to be able to add, edit and remove pretty much any piece of content on the website through a web based administration system (Expression Engine) and it was this ‘dynamism’ which created problems for us.
Never knowing how many columns a headline might require, or how many work examples might appear on the home page at any given time certainly gave us some headaches but we knew that we couldn’t compromise on the creative approach and so we didn’t, instead we persisted and found solutions to the problems.
I’d like to think that the end result does a great deal to communicate what Voyage is about and that it will provide the company with the platform they hoped for to showcase their creative work. It has been a pleasure to work with the Voyage team on this project, they have high standards and know ‘exactly’ what they’re after. Good to know if you’re a prospective or current client of theirs. :)
The art of giving Sep 26. 062
For the past couple of months here at Nine Four we’ve been working on behalf of Voyage to develop an e-commerce website for one of their clients; Innova Gifts.
It’s been a really interesting project to have become involved in and it’s given us a great opportunity to get to know the client and the motivation behind their decision to start the Business. Innova Gifts are looking to carve a niche for themselves selling really high quality gifts online, which are quite literally sourced from all over the world.
Further to this they provide a truly exceptional level of service, wrapping your gifts and adding a personal message tag for you at no extra cost.
Being the nice people they are Innova Gifts are offering you, my readers, a 10% discount on any orders you make between now and the 31st of October 2006. Just purchase something from the site using the following reference code ‘6CDNP1006’ during the checkout process to qualify. :)
Oxton gives birth! Apr 14. 060
It was beautiful I’m telling you, I was there when it happened, Oxton just gave birth… to Bite Size Standards.
Bite Size Standards was conceived by John way back in 2005. The basic idea being that busy web designers don’t always have time to read or write lengthy tutorials but that a daily “bite�? of useful information, taken or given, could be good for the soul. I’ve contributed a small crumb for you to nibble on.
So, go visit, subscribe to the feed and digest the daily bites.
Customer service the right way Apr 10. 062
Well it’s a fair old time since I had such a good customer service experience that I was left visibly ‘gleaming‘. As it happens I just had one this very evening.
For the past month or so I’ve been working on a Expression Engine powered website for a client. The last few evenings I’ve been adding finishing touches, making last minute tweaks etc.
One of these ‘tweaks’ involved a total rewrite of logic behind a section (Yes I know, not such a good idea this far in) , to be exact a rethink of how I was using the CMS to store and seperate the data. I decided to switch from using a single section to using two, one which maintained common event information, and another which recorded event dates and locations. I then used the ‘“related entries”:http://eedocs.pmachine.com/modules/weblog/related_entries.html’ feature within Expression Engine to create a link between the two.
According to the maual, this should have worked without complaint, to begin with it did. However as I continued to link my existing entries to the relevant event records I stumbled across some weirdness. A quick search on the Expression Engine forums turned up a thread which documented a similar problem, I posted a response outlining my problem and within a few hours of that initial posting I have a patched file from the development team which fixes the bug.
That is great customer service.
Ubuntu, Ubuntu they drink it in the congo Mar 24. 0611
I’ve been wanting to perform a bit of an update on my local dev server for a while, I’m currently running Debian with the usual LAMP suspects (Apache, PHP and MySQL) but had never been able to get little extras like the GD image libraries up and running for my lack of Linux knowledge and total lack of desire to spend hours working out exactly what I needed to do.
Ubuntu has been on my radar for a good few months and I know that Oxton has been using it for some time without need for any public ranting so I thought I might give it a shot.
I requested a set of free discs (yes they are free!) from the Ubuntu website and they arrived a few days back (fantastic packaging). While the wife was out with the kids and there was no immediate danger of her wanting to check her email I swiped her peripherals (ooer) and plugged them into my target machine, an old Dell OptiPlex GX1.
The only hurdle I had to face was (Surprisignly for Linux distros) not software related, the blasted CD-ROM drive door wouldn’t open. With a bit of cajouling the disc was in, I restarted the PC and the Ubuntu setup programme kicked into action, I opted to install Ubuntu in it’s ‘server’ form without a GUI as this machine is after all destined to sit in the corner of the office whiring away with just a ethernet cable and power lead for company. The install was ‘sooooo’ simple compared to Debian, I think I only had to specify a language and time zone, provide a name for the machine (Risotto) and then I was done.
With Ubuntu up and running I did a quick install of SSH, unplugged the peripherals (and returned them before wifey noticed) then SSH’d in from my PC to uncompress and install XAMPP. For designers/developers like me I think XAMPP is great, one single install and you have pretty much everything you’ll need for day to day LAMP development, including the GD image libraries.
Success!