Category: New business
New Pure PR website moves with the times
This week sees the launch of a new WordPress website for London based PR company Pure PR.
Pure PR work with beauty, health and lifestyle brands and also aim to make the world a better a place by working with eco friendly products and companies.
The website is a simple structure that is navigated as though you are on one large page and the site moves from section to section. The new company branding is used throughout teh site and we’ve tried to keep to the site light, approachable and fun to use.
All the pages are just one click away and the proposition is clear and unfussy. We have also included a blog and added their Pinterest feed onto the homepage. All very simple but very effective we think.
“When you work with gorgeous beauty and lifestyle products all day, it is sometimes hard to drag yourself away and concentrate on building your own website. We needed a team that could take our brief and run with it. So, when we saw By The Scruff’s initial proposal, we knew they were the right choice. Stuart, Andy and co. totally understood what we wanted for our website and have delivered. We do believe the site offers an ideal snap shot into our Pure PR world.” Kelly Marks, Co Founder and Director
Find out more about how Pure PR could help your brand or product here www.purepr.com and have a look at some of the screen shots below.
New Metrica website goes online
We’re proud to be working with Metrica on the redesign of the new company website which launched today.
More to follow.
How we built the 30 Years of Schuh flash website
Having spent 7 weeks building the 30 Years of Schuh website I thought it would be useful to get my developers summary of how this was tackled. Daniel has kindly broken down the challenges he faced and some of the solutions we used on this project. This will hopefully give some of you an insight into how we built the site.
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
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.
New website for My Architect
A new website for local architect firm HUT was launched this week. The new site www.myarchitect.net uses a custom WordPress design and backend to manage the website.
Users are shown a slideshow of the key areas they work in from extensions, conversions, new build etc. The site is designed to be simple but informative and aimed at encouraging customers to understand what they do and make contacting the business easy.
From the website “We offer a broad range of architectural services to make your home more functional, beautiful and affordable. All our fees are pre-agreed at the outset, giving you certainty over your project budget. Work with My Architect and have your own professional architect, whatever the project size or budget, and your required level of input.”
Scott Batty of My Architect says “we really enjoyed working with By The Scruff- they are creative, professional and as their name implies- they seize the opportunity and make the most of it”. What nice words, we hope teh site attracts some good business in.
The website is fully manageable by their staff using the easy-to-use WordPress backend. We encourage all of our clients to write useful informative blog posts and Hut will hopefully be adding posts about their new projects thriugh the year.
For more details go to www.myarchitect.net
30 years of Schuh kicks off
Schuh, the highstreet and online footware retailer, this week started its 30th birthday celebrations and the launch of a new marketing campaign. Lead by Roar, By the Scruff is producing the new website 30yearsofschuh.co.uk that will launch next month. The website will look back over the last 30 years at events that have shaped youth culture in the UK through fashion, music, politics and world affairs. It will allow users to add their memories of these times and let them create their own piece of history in this online timeline.
Take a look at 30yearsofschuh.co.uk and look out for the new site next month.
Smart Facts mobi site goes live for Computing
By the Scruff are commissioned to design a mobile site for IBM to run on the Computing mobile site. We designed the brand, layout and navigation and the banner ads that feature on the mobi site and the V3 and Computing websites.The development was carried out by Black Mobile Solutions
“Computing magazine is a well established information brand for senior IT professionals. With consistently growing traffic to our mobile site, we were keen to engage more with these people and get an understanding of how they are interacting with the mobile platform. In association with IBM, we came up with Smart Facts, a mobile site where users get facts about the effect of inaccurate data on businesses. Users have the opportunity to find out more about these issues and enter their email address if they wish to receive an IBM white paper on the topic. The mobile site also includes some poll questions to test the level of user engagement.
In order to achieve this we firstly needed a design for the mobile site and then some traffic drivers to encourage people to switch from PC to mobile to view the site. With very little brief or direction, By the Scruff created a fantastic brand for Smart Facts and design for the site. Both ourselves and IBM were immediately pleased.
Creating traffic drivers brought about a different set of challenges as we needed to encourage people to not simply view Smartfacts.mobi but they could only do so on their phone. By the Scruff decided to create ads with phone number capture so users were prompted to enter their phone number and we’d send a SMS with a link to Smartfacts.mobi. The ads look great and response so far has been very encouraging.
It’s always a pleasure working with By the Scruff, their ideas and energy is great and the product always comes out looking fantastic.” Louise Burry, Online Marketing Manager, Incisive Media
Smarts4youracing website launched
A new website for specialist race and parts maker of the Smart car Smarts4youracing is launched today. The Smarts4youracing team are heading to Monaco right now in the special race adapted Smart car for some fearless promotion of the new business.
The company are moving into making specialist race parts for the Smart car and hope eventually to be running a championship in the UK later this year.
In the next month or so we will be adding a shopping cart with a full catalgue of parts that will be on sale to customers worldwide.
Best of luck to you boys! Find out more www.smarts4youracing.com