Devstars

Wearing our Sunday Best

miles — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:32:48 +0000

Once in a while you feel like putting on your best gear to show off and feel good about yourself. When we were asked by a client to help deliver a smart new bit of bib’n'tucker for the lovely people at Sunday Best we jumped!

Sunday Best needed a simple stylish way to merge their label’s news and releases with a new store built on Sandbag’s fine platform. The two platforms we used share data between them but keep the CMS pretty simple for the client.

One of our favourite new treatments for displaying articles is this magazine style for their news section.

We hope that we helped keep the fun in their site but also allowed them to update and share their wonderful content as much as possible.

Technologies

magento/Wordpress/

Some one page lovelyness for Salomon

devstars — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:59:55 +0000

We’ve been working with designers Salad Creative for over 6 years now and Skidpasset for Salomon is the latest fruit of our labours. The observant of you will notice it is in Swedish and the purpose of the site is for a one off Cross country skiing event.

With this in mind a one page site was built with a bespoke content management system that allows the client to update videos and sponsor banners.

Event entries and newsletter signups are supported with a newsletter system to allow easy contact with the competitors.

Click here to visit the site

Paul wins .net Young Developer of the Year 2011

devstars — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:12:33 +0000

We’d all like to offer our congratulations to our superstar team member Paul Davis on winning his first award of many last night.

Paul’s passion and excitement for what he does is key to his success and an inspiration to us all. On a day that the UK government announce 1 billion in support of youth employment he sets a shinning example of how you can go out (or stay in) and learn a trade.

Paul didn’t need to spend 3 years at Uni, he absorbs information wherever he is, his alma mater write books and lecture on technology and they are usually only a tweet away (almost 12,000 tweets!!!).

Paul, it’s an honour and a privilege to have you on the team, we all hope your head doesn’t hurt too much this morning!

Simple, clean and effective

miles — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:09:17 +0000

We were asked to produce a web presence and brand style for a new tech company as quickly as possible. Budgets were tight so, by keeping all the work in house, we managed to deliver the job on time and on budget.

Please take a look http://www.coworthtechnologies.com/

An Appetite for Design

devstars — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:07:54 +0000

We’ve been working with Appetite for a little over a year now and have worked with them on client sites for Trapoil and The Legacy List.

After completing a small holding site a few months back we’re launching their brand new site today. The site showcases Appetite’s work for Adgistics, Unilever, Trapoil and the University of Leeds using some cool slidy viewers.

Almost every aspect of the site is content managed from a WordPress back end that allows for smart navigation pulling in related content into pages where required. To simplify the content management process we created bespoke plug-ins so the client could manage portfolio items and gallery.

As the site features a lot of large graphics and background images attention has been paid to optimising the pages and the server platform to ensure fast loading pages giving the site an A ranking on GT-Metrix

Check out the site here

Maloney’s Budgens

devstars — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:44:40 +0000

There doesn’t seem to be a week goes by without Maloney’s Budgens winning another award. With 3 stores in Ascot, Shepperton and Virginia Water they have just followed up their Business in the Community , Small business of the year being awarded with the Food and Drink awards Community Partnership Awards.

On top of that we’re very pleased to announce the launch of a their brand new site and social networking channels.

www.maloneysbudgens.com

Renaissance Returns

devstars — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:34:48 +0000

After a short break one of the UK’s premier dance labels and clubs returns. We built the previous Renaissance web site over 6 years ago so were over the moon when they came back and asked us to help on their new site.

The label is coming up to it’s 20th anniversary and launches with The Masters Series Dave Seaman and a worldwide tour featuring dates in London, Moscow and Sydney.

The site boasts a full featured e-commerce area and is setup for physical and downloadable sales with overseas shipping.

Bespoke plug-ins were created for the home page carousel, discography, nights and social networking integration.

Click here to visit the site

Greta’s Interview for the Lightbox

devstars — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:47:48 +0000

As everyone else had good excuses Greta kindly agreed to be interviewed about Devstars for the Lightbox web site. We’re hoping we don’t lose her to a career on the silver screen now.

Opt Out of Google Analytics

devstars — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:39:39 +0000

We use Google Analytics on almost every website we built, manage or host. It’s a great tool and records so much data we can use to help move your website forward. The downside it, is records your browsing of your own site too, ending up on skewed date. There are things we can do to stop your own browsing of your website from affecting the recorded stats like exclude your IP address, but IP’s can sometimes be dynamic, possibly chancing daily!

We don’t know the motivation or reasons behind it, but Google just released a little browser extension for IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari & Opera that prevents your browser from sending data to their Analytics service. This means that you can browse your own site without skewing the data, but that you can also browse the competition without them tracking you.

If you want to browse covertly, install the extension.

Adventure Bar Site Launch

devstars — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:16:43 +0000

Once again we’ve been working with the lovely peeps over at Mystery Brand Design Studios and this time for London based bar chain Adventure bar.

The site uses WordPress as a base but we’ve built in custom plug-ins so the client can manage a venue specific cocktail gallery. The features html5 video, animated sprite images, and plugs directly into there booking system through API’s.

Click here to visit the site