20Aug
On Wednesday 25th August, Chris Gibson will be presenting to the London ExpressionEngine meet up.
This forum has proven to be a great support during our recent development of the PFRA and Elephant Family websites and now it's our turn to give something back to the community and talk to the benefits of working on this extremely flexible CMS.
Specifically, Chris will be talking about his recent work with ExpressionEngine 2.1 - we redeveloped and pushed live the Marfan Trust website less than one month after version 2.1 was launched.
If you're interested in learning more about ExpressionEngine why not pop along to the Bell Pub (Middlesex Street, E1) from 7pm on Wednesday 25th August.
18Aug
We are pleased to announce the launch of our new best of breed mobile site.
Derived from the need to support our mobile audience, we have embraced this opportunity to deploy a progressive enhancement approach and delivered a great-looking, branded, standards compliant site that works on all internet capable handsets.
Following a requirements gathering exercise which helped us determine what should be in scope, we defined the information architecture for the mobile site by re-evaluating the structure from our current website and highlighting the core content required for the lowest level mobile devices.
This fed straight into the design process where we translated our brand to fit the constraints of the mobile platform and the resulting front-end delivers optimum HTML for minimum page weight – ensuring page load times are quick and cost effective for the user.
Matt Bee, mobile project lead said:
Targeting the lower-level code as the starting point and scaling (up) from there has allowed us to develop a well-designed, branded functional site that works on all combinations of browser and mobile device.
11Aug
Today sees the launch of a brand new website for research based charity, The Marfan Trust.
Founded in 1988, the Marfan Trust funds research into the cause and prevention of Marfan syndrome, a dominantly inherited cardiac disorder which also affects eyes and skeleton.
We first worked with the Marfan Trust back in 2005 and were delighted to be commissioned to work with them again to plan, design and develop a new website to support their fundraising intiatives, showcase their research output and to help raise awareness of Marfan syndrome.
Helga Dydyk, Charity administrator said:
We are delighted with the redesign of our website which incorporates a DVD on Marfan syndrome. This new dynamic site will help to increase awareness to this inherited genetic disorder.
30Jul
The UK Government today published a negative response to a call to encourage its departments to adopt modern technology.
Despite the precedent set by the German and French governments to encourage people to upgrade away from the browser Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) because of security flaws, the UK government has today failed to follow suit.
IE6 was released way back in 2001, yet our industry is forced to support this archaic technology by government departments who have failed to upgrade their systems and backward thinking companies and public sector organisations that take the same stance.
9web signed a petition recently to encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6 but this call has fallen on deaf ears and despite the security issues the government responded claiming that it will be "more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6".
We can only hope that our clients are more forward thinking than the government and embrace the principles of progressive enhancement and work with us in the adoption of modern web development practices to deliver an enhanced experience for their users.
