Devstars

Are you pinterest-ed?

miles — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:20:52 +0000

New Social Phenomenons are simple to stumble upon but hard to get to the bottom of. The latest global superstar is Pintrest, a small company started by Ben Silbermann, an Iowa based ex-Google employee. The site was launched in March 2010 and today has record breaking pageviews, mainly down to the addictive nature of ‘pinning’ images from any page in the web.

We at Devstars are not shy to get involved and have been pinning for a few weeks now. At first it seemed a little alien as the vast majority of content is generated in the USA. Just by clicking on the sports section of the site brings up many American sports as you would expect but the main difference is the gender of the pinned content. We found an interesting infographic here exposing the striking differences between US and UK ‘Pinteresters’.

The UI & UX job on this site is first class, once you have installed a ‘pin it’ link to your browser bar you can instantly pin any image in a page whilst you browse. Every time you pin an image you are asked to share that image on Facebook and Twitter or just see your pin. Driving users to view their pins each time must be one of the reasons for such high pageview stats.

After a few days of pinning I can see the appeal, sometimes facebook has too many buttons to push just to throw an idea into your webspace. Pintrest makes it very simple to organise your own boards, grouping similar interest images in one spot. You can group a whole board based just on your favourite colour, music or hobby. Other users can choose to follow, like and share the content of these boards without too much fuss. All in all, this is one new social channel that will probably be around for some time (at least 6 months!)

http://pinterest.com/

More one page loveliness from G’nosh

devstars — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:52:52 +0000

We’ve been building sites with Food and Drink specialist design agency Mystery for 7 years now and this beautiful one page site for G’nosh is the latest fruit of our labours. Don’t be put off by just the one page though, there’s lots of cool stuff to scroll or slide through. We’ve pulled in latest feeds from their twitter account and embedded a moderated message board that you can use your Facebook account to post to.

G’nosh make gourmet dips that you will be able to buy from lots of cool shops like Selfridges.

Here’s the site…

New e-commerce store for new west end musical Singin’ in the Rain

devstars — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:57:54 +0000

Following on from stores for Bob Dylan, Rufus Wainwright, Sister Act the Musical and Bryan Mays’ Anthems tour we’ve just launched this new store for Chris Cooke Management.

As well as the store we also took the opportunity to update Chris’s web site to feature some of their new projects including Barclays Tennis Finals.

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