The navigation has been made much clearer to drive bookings and make it quicker for customers to find what they want.

Lewis Swan, Managing Director says
“Given my previous experience of how the guys at By the Scruff work and how they always seem to deliver exactly what I wanted (plus more) it was a no brainer for them to redesign our company website. The results have been outstanding and the functionality we now have on the site means people can find tours even easier and get all the information they need within 1 or 2 clicks at most. People say to us they love the simplicity of the site and that its very easy to find things. That has been a big contributing factor to the success of our business since we launched 2 years ago.”

Visit the Britmovietours website britmovietours.com for some great film and location tours in the OK.

The new website benefits from a completyely new design and is developed on the WordPress system.

The London Wildlife Trust is using the blog to promote their work in the area and to encourage people to take a more active role in local conservation and to appreciate the diverse wildlife. They have many different activities planned that will be promoted on the Barking Riverside website through this year and 2012.

Users can find new image galleries with pictures of the new building taking place including the recently completed Rivergate Centre. The website will be updated more regularly as new property is built and becomes available for sale.

Developed under the management of the Homes & Communities Agency this new site has been in the making since 2007 when we were first commissioned to design and build the website. Its been a long time coming and many changes have happened in that period. We hope the site can see the development through this next phase of building.

For further information go to barkingriverside.co.uk

Read ahead for the race report:

Smarts4youracing which owns and runs the 4Two Cup, a race series for the little town car, entered the larger forfour model owned by the smart club into the prestigious Britcar 24hr race at Silverstone. It was the first time in the world that a Smart car had been entered into such a gruelling race and was up against some very fast cars from marques including Porsche, Ferrari, and Aston Martin.

The drivers consisted of four very experienced racers: 4Two Cup founders and former Britcar winners, Paul Bates and James Palmer, local racer Tom Mills and 16 year old David Moore, the current 4Two Cup series leader. Nigel Moore from Tockwith motorsport help build and run the car as our chief engineer. Nigel is the youngest British driver to race at Le Mans for a works team, So plenty of experience there.

Paul Bates said: ‘We had a very good team running the car and some great sponsors, including CFT Financials and drum and bass label, Ram Records.  The team set out with one goal and that was to finish the race.’

Things didn’t start off too well during Thursday practice as the car had a misfire, which took until the early hours of Friday to rectify.  This meant that the car went into qualifying without any testing on the tyres that would be used in the race.

Qualifying took place and due to their practice problem this left the team on the starting grid in 54^th place out of 57 cars.

The race got underway at 4.30pm on Saturday afternoon and first to take to the wheel was Paul Bates.  James Palmer was followed by Tom Mills and finally 16 year old David ‘Nipper’ Moore.  At this point the Smart car was up to 27^th overall.

Near disaster was about to strike as darkness approached when David radioed through to the team with a fuel surge problem.

James Palmer added: ‘ He came into the pits for a check and the team found that the fuel tank had split.  So 6hrs in to the race a decision was made to take the fuel tank out of a road car, fit all the special fitting and put this on the race car. 1hr and 5mins later the car was back on track, but had dropped back to 36^th place.’

The car pounded on into the night gaining places and was back up to 33^rd, when a wheel bearing broke causing the brakes to fail.

As Paul Bates said: ‘What a scary moment,  I was approaching Brooklands at 125mph with no brakes.’

Once again the car pitted for a new wheel hub and brakes and less than an hour later the car emerged from the pits in 37^th place.  On it went for the next 11 hours with only the scheduled stops for fuel, new tyres and driver changes. As the race went on the team climbed back up the leader board.

By 4pm on Sunday the car was not surprisingly looking worse for wear.  Half its wing was missing, it had no side skirts, a very badly cracked windscreen and a suspension issue.

But despite all that on it went to take the chequered flag on a late Sunday afternoon in 28^th place overall.

The car had completed a total of 456 laps of Silverstone race circuit, a total of 1,672 miles.

740 Litres of fuel had been used and 6 sets of slick tyres.

We would like to say a massive thank you to all of our sponsors and team. Without them this would have not been possible.

Roll on next year.

For more information about Smarts4YouRacing go to smarts4youracing.com

The website already offers tips and advice on the latest style and trends from the world of interiors and this new online service will allow customers to contact Pippa directly and draw on her 15 years as an Interior Stylist.

Customers from anywhere can submit their questions to Pippa and her team, who will answer them at an introductory rate of £38. This online-only service can be bought directly from the website, and Pippa aims to answer all questions within 5 working days. Her answers will provide advice and guidance, and aim to help customers make an informed decision to make their homes beautiful and stylish.

To use the service simply go to www.pippajamesoninteriors.co.uk and click ‘Ask The Experts’. Users can buy this service through Paypal and then submit their question to Pippa who guarantees a personal response. We are confident that customers will like what we say, but if for any reason they are not entirely satisfied then we will refund their money.

Pippa says, “We realised that there was a gap in the market for people looking for quick solutions to their dilemmas that are too small to warrant employing a full-time Interior Designer but still need the expertise of an industry professional. We see this as an affordable and accessible service that can benefit anyone that is looking for answers to their interior style questions.”

This bespoke WordPress design allows Schuh to publish their content through a custom template we (By the Scruff)  have developed. The guys at Schuh have produced these pages themselves which was an easy task (we hope) and they will be able to manage the pages going forward.

Visitors can either buy the shoes from a link or they can ask to be informed when theshoes go on sale. This functionality is easily controlled through teh Woprdpress dashboard.

For more information go to www.30yearsofschuh.co.uk/site/collaborations/

Front-end

The project was entirely created in Flash because of its interactive nature.

The interface was based on the timeline concept with parallax effect and huge amount of images being loaded on the fly. It made perfect sense to use Flash in this case. We could develop a number of optimisations to help the user interface to be as responsive and smooth as possible. One of the main goals was to keep file size low which sometimes is a main concern for clients using Flash. Nobody likes to wait so long for a 5mb website no matter how beautiful it is. However, having the opportunity to design something from scratch, do this well and use all advantages of Flash can offer it wasn’t difficult to keep final project below 200kb. I am pretty sure that with more time and graphical optimisation it could be even below 100kb. Oh, and one more thing; forget about PureMVC or other frameworks in this case. Frameworks themselves are a monster sometimes.

Parallax effect

To make the time-line experience even more interesting we decided to use many different planes and base on difference in the apparent position and move them across with different speed. That visual effect made interactivity more enjoyable however it did increase the level of difficulty of the project. From now on all the optimisation needed had to apply for every single plane and affect back-end development as well. During the movement, positions of the images were no longer fixed so it made it difficult to move them on demanding position. For this reason we had to build in some administration features to give a moderator the possibility to amend it.

Image container

The entire project was all about the visual content and image display. This element quickly became a crucial part of the entire structure and the main subject of optimisation. Keeping all the images constantly on the screen simply wouldn’t work. It also increased the memory consumption and took up precious processor cycles to render the timeline smoothly. Also loading all the images and unloading them when not needed wasn’t the best option. At the same time loaded content shouldn’t affect the user interface, so it had to be asynchronous approach. So, the image container is in fact deeply integrated with the custom loader system, internal caching solution and is constantly being used by the viewport optimisation algorithm that is checking those containers against a visible part of the screen.

With this approach garbage collector is maintaining memory usage and it let us develop a solution that can handle 500 images being loaded on load.

Back End

When you look at the whole picture this project is nothing else but a little blog system. Users can upload their own photos, post a comment and rate others peoples images. In addition to that they can also share posts and events on Facebook. For this reason we had to develop a more sophisticated registration/login system. There is a huge amount of data being transferred under the hood. And again, it has to be as small and efficient as possible. For this reason we couldn’t use standard xml as a dynamic data format. It is way to heavy and parser needed is too slow to compare to our custom protocol which is almost as small as AM3 format. Parser crunching all the information in one go.

PHP

This language comes in handy for Flash and Data Base communication. Giving us a lot of flexibility to do whatever we want to do and more importantly, can take intense calculations on the server side leaving more resources to the client. We decided not to use any framework since in our case it’s a bridge between Flash and MySQL. Files are very small and simple to make processing time needed on the 0.0001 ms level.

Data Base

It holds all the information as any typical blog system does. Nothing is too complicated

Facebook

These days more and more companies are using the power of Facebook to spread news about their projects to the world. In fact for us developers it means additional work and headache. It’s not a good practice to make your website completely dependent of 3th party solution. So, when comes to Facebook connect you thinking about both. There is many different ways to deal with Facebook and Flash.

However latest AS3 Facebook API base on latest OGraph is so easy to use that front end side of this integration took no more than 3 days. And this is what we have used.

www.30yearsofschuh.co.uk

The first brands to benefit from the Flash banner CMS include the men’s gadget magazine ‘Stuff’ and the football magazine ‘FourFourTwo’ with the iPad2 launch being the very first campaign.

For more information about the Flash banner CMS or if you feel your company could benefit from a such a service, feel free to drop us a line on 0207 033 4269 or email getit@bythescruff.com and we can discuss how the banner system can help you and your business.

Haymarket Media has launched its Christmas subscriptions campaign in the run up to Christmas 2010. By the Scruff have created all the email creative and banner ads that will run across the groups whole portfolio.

The HTML emails will be sent out to the groups customer database over the coming weeks advertising big savings on subscriptions to titles like Stuff, Classic FM, WhatCar? with the copy line “The gift that keeps on giving”. The flash banner ads also run the same copy and focus on groups of themed titles for sport, motor sports, motoring etc.

You can see some examples below and see the ads online at themagazineshop.com and other websites.

The website has been nominated for the ‘Design Democracy blog awards’ and we need your votes. Click here to vote now and help us get this blog the recognition it deserves. Thank you for your help.

This powerful content management system was chosen because of the scale of the website and the features needed for it to run a multi language website. The company’s entire catalogue will eventually be added in up to 7 different languages.

Customers can search for products and view detailed information about the many accessories available through retailers. The website does not sell directly but provides users with product information and support on the latest products.

By the Scruff has fully customised the design and modified the Expression Engine back-end to allow staff at Adapt to manage the online product inventory. We’ve used JQuery to display promotions and product galleries which are completely managed through the CMS.

Go to www.adapt-mobile.com