hello, my name is
nathan pitman.

Why choose ExpressionEngine? Jul 03. 08

The guys over at EllisLab are asking why choose ExpressionEngine? Right off the top of my head, here’s my response…

Developing for tomorrows web Jun 25. 08

More often than not I find myself building websites with the outlook of developing for ‘the here and now’, taking into account the browsers that we are using today and also those which we were using yesterday (Please stand up IE6)!

So my question is this; Should we be actively developing for tomorrow, not today, using new technology wherever possible and providing only those with bleeding edge browsers (Safari 3 & Firefox 3) with the perfect experience? Is it now acceptable to present users of yesterdays, and even today’s web browsers with a degraded experience?

Consider that most websites might have a shelf life of 2 – 3 years, and you soon realise that the website you are developing might only be viewed using today’s web browsers for 6 months of it’s life, with the majority then migrating to Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (or whatever it may be) and dilapidated browsers like Internet Explorer 6 fading into the dark and distant background.

SiteVista to become Litmus Aug 01. 07

I’m rather excited about the news that the SiteVista team have been hard at work on a big shiny update to their website and email testing tools which will be relaunched as ‘Litmus’.

I use SiteVista on a regular basis, in the most part as a tool to help me refine and bug fix HTML email templates. With Outlook 2007 well and truly out there it’s great to have a platform to hand that you can quickly and easily test on, even if in most cases you end up weeping at the result of Microsoft’s dabbling with the Outlook rendering engine.

The news of a revised interface and lightning-fast testing makes me feel all wobbly at the knees! Don’t keep us waiting too long guys! :)

God is in the details May 16. 07

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. 06

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. :)