Another 9xb success story, another exercise in modern Web 2.0.

A snippet from the client case study on the new 9xb website.

Pleasure Island approached 9xb looking for a website to support their prime time TV advertising campaign. Phase one of the project was to build an information site that would provide a reference point for the attraction with a design aimed to project the excitement of a day out at this theme park. Still in the pipeline is phase two, building an interactive park map and developing an online ticket ordering facility.

I was the account designer for Pleasure Island and I thoroughly enjoyed designing a website that wasn’t ‘ecommerce’ or ‘white label’, this actually had a great design potential that wasn’t fulfilled by their existing website.

Time for another snippet I think..

As a theme park, it was important for the design to have the wow factor, to get across the excitement of the attractions and to give browsers a real feel for the thrilling rides they’ll find at the park. Pleasure Island had a strong existing corporate identity and the site needed to mirror this style and tie in with their printed communications materials.

Using the powerful Javascript framework, jQuery we created seamless ride selection transitions on the white knuckle ride page, presenting ride videos and photos in an effective and slick way.

I recommend that if you’re a little bit interested in Linux you have a listen to the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

Recently I joined the transcribers’ team. The aim of the team is to transcribe each of the existing episodes and all future ones to publish on that there Interweb.

My only contribution to date is to provide a way of prettifying the the transcriber XML files automagically, but more will follow!

It’s about five weeks too late but I should let you know that I have a new job.

For various reasons I decided to leave Core UK, formerly known as Azzurri Education, formerly known as Progrid, (UK) Limited; I shalln’t bore you with them.

So, where am I now?

I’m pleased to say that I’m working for Ebuyer Limited in Howden, East Yorkshire as a web developer.

I’m now working with PHP, Linux, MySQL, XML and XSLT with Ubuntu on my desktop (hurrah!) with no Windows in sight (double hurrah!).

It’s a really exciting time for me. I became a customer of Ebuyer way years ago and have always had great respect for them so to be offered the opportunity to work for them actually feels like a great honour.

They have a lot of clever guys working for them and the first few weeks have been really hard going as there is a lot to learn – but learn it I shall.

Anyway, to keep me in a job go and buy your great value consumer electronics.

We’ve had a busy frog who’s incorporated the rather excellent wordpress blog software into our website.

If you bookmarked the old urls, or are reading this through RSS then you will have been redirected to the new location but you may wish to update your bookmarks.

The good news for me is that updating the blog should now be easy peasy and so I should be able to blog more often!

6 weeks and over 200 working hours later my employers new website has finally gone Live.

It looks great, and has received rave reviews from all 9xb’s clients and associates. One client was quoted in saying “Most probably the best website I have ever seen“… sweet to hear but I feel this client may have been flattering us slightly.

I as usual contributed both on the design and the build. My major contribution was in the ‘Team’ section, every member of staff (all twenty of them) had their own page created for them. In the initial planning meetings I came up with the idea of creating a set of high impact, computer manipulated photographs of the team, with the aim of setting the company apart from its competitors and highlighting the great personalities we have in the company.

Below is an example of a before (original) and after…

… yep, that’s me, a very rare shot of me too!

A few screenshots:

Things I did:

• Organised and creatively directed the companies photoshoot
• Creation of 20 high impact staff portraits
• Partial design, including team pages
• Overall execution of design and development

Please visit www.9xb.com to see it in all it’s glory!