Stuckproper
A sample logo treatment for a homework help website.
Stefan Goodchild
SpecializeIn Holding Page
Quick design for a Specialize In holding page for the new product from Jiva Technology. Beta will be launching later this year.
Farewell, Real World. Hello Jiva
It’s day two at my new home - Jiva Technology - following a rousing send off from Real World. My seven years in the Real World were both enjoyable and challenging but we all have to move on at some point and I felt my time was now.
My new home at Jiva is a startup company building web services to help people find other people who can help. The first product is a website called Beanbag Learning and it’s purpose is to help parents find tutors in their local area for their children. Moving the ‘word of mouth’ culture onto the Internet in short if you will.
I’m excited to find out that my first project is an Adobe AIR application built round communication. This is something very interesting to both design and build as the technologies and UI paradigms involved are pretty well defined these days so the basics of the interaction are pretty much in stone and assumed so that leaves all the fun stuff. The details.
WOMAD
The replacement WOMAD site following our decision to drop the old Lasso site after the server theft. A new OO based forum code is the main new feature on the code front.
Nothing really new up front as yet in terms of features but - like Real World Records - the site has been designed to be extended easily over the coming months with plenty of scope for custom areas.
Standards based, with proper separation and where possible semantic markup this is the final Real World site to move to PHP from Lasso and the final missing site after the theft.
Real World Records
I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.
This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.
Realworld Records New Website Live
Finally managed to get the replacement Realworld Records website online last friday. It was the website that along with WOMAD’s website that was based on a very old version of Lasso that we decided to finally put out to pasture so this new version is based on a LAMP backend.
I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.
This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.
None of this would have been possible however without the hard work of the Records staff who have spent some of the last year on data entry of the catalogue information into the new discography system, so many thanks to Jon!
Filthy Robbers Stole Our Servers!
You may have seen it on the interweb news already (Techcrunch, Slashdot, The Register etc) so I’m late to the party, mainly due to the fact I’ve been hard at work restoring our lost servers. I say lost. I mean nicked.
Stolen.
So a note to all you admins out there in charge of sites. Have a think about what your strategy is in case on not just hardware failure, but total loss. Not something you think about too often.
We are mainly back after 4 days of frantic work, but have made some harsh decisions about the very old sites based on some archaic tech that we have just cut free and plan to remake. The only main one missing as of now is Real World Records which we are planning to get online in a new form this week.
Alongside the restore we moved hosts, and switched to a hosted system rather than a co-located server so had to get elbow deep to reconfigure most of the sites to get them working on the new server so this wasn’t just a simple backup restore.
The only missing thing are the video assets. We will be re-encoding and re-uploading those over time to take advantage of the new flash based video player we switched to earlier this year.
As ever having Peter’s name attached gives it legs in the blog world and here is some of the reporting.
Techcrunch | Wall Street Journal | Slashdot | The Register
Always interesting to read the comments (apart from the endless Sledgehammer jokes) and see what people on the outside think our setup is like. Most appear to assume a large enterprise type setup with a team of devs, designers and editors. The reality is much more modest.
Big Blue Ball
A microsite (but a big one!) for the new release from Real World Records. Features custom flash audio and video players and pulls data from the custom Real World CMS.
Womad Shop
Brand new replacement shop for Real World which currently has a 7 figure turnover thanks to the exclusive stocking of WOMAD tickets.
Front and back end rebuilt from the ground up to enable products to be grouped in dynamic ways so digital downloads can be incorporated in the next phase with lots of work done to make the front end as simple as possible to create a higher conversion rate despite the relatively high amount of information required on-screen.