The Frontier Group - Blog

Making use of professional photography to create amazing websites that stand the test of time

December 3rd, 2009, by fitzy

One of the bigger factors to consider when designing a website is whether or not to incorporate photographs into the design. You have the choice of no photography at all, utilising stock photography, or using a professional to capture photographs specifically for the website.

Certain industries and business niches really thrive with the inclusion of professional photography in a website design. Whether to convey to the customer or shareholder the true nature of the business, or to show professionalism, or perhaps to make something instantly recognisable to the website viewer.

We try to use professional photographs as much as possible where the client will allow it, as it can really bring a website to life.

An oldie but a goodie

This website for Caudo Group has been around for a few years now, but the inclusion of high quality photography (taken by one of our team members), really helps this design stand the test of time. We captured photographs of their brand new office at the time, and some of their equipment.

Supplied photography

These photographs really emphasize the nature of Helix Resources, and the industry they are involved in. These photographs were supplied by their team, but are still of a high enough quality to really bring the website to life. This website is about 18 months old now, but once again retains a fresh feel thanks to some high quality images.

When stock is best

Some websites and industries work better with stock photography. Either the service is disconnected from the place of business, or there might be no images to work with. For a professional feel that still reaches out to particular demographics, stock photography can be used to great effect. In the case of Ironmonger Financial it is used to connect with the website visitor to show them that the content they are reading is relevant to them.

As you can see, using high quality images in a design can really work wonders.

It’s certainly not the rule, however an attractive, professional website goes a long way to showing your customers the care and professionalism that you apply to the business. An integral part of how you represent yourself to clients, customers and the world at large!

A business missing out on this, or having a low quality website is positioning themselves behind the eight ball, giving their competitors an easy ride to market share.

We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.

Posted in Inside TFG, Websites or Tools | No Comments »

Why Your Clients Should Upgrade Their Web Browsers

December 3rd, 2009, by aaron

I think the IT industry has a tendency to push our clients and users to upgrade, or change things to suit our requirements or desires. Often times the reasons may be rooted in practicality, but as good IT workers tend to develop heuristics for problem solving they can sometimes find it hard to explain their reasoning.

A good example is browser upgrades. We all know it’s a worthwhile suggestion, and having the latest browser is the best option in most cases, but explaining that to a user or client can be difficult. It can be especially difficult if you don’t have face time with a user; the most common situation in the web environment.

Telling a user that the site works better in Firefox 3 or Safari 4 will, perhaps, just lead to the user finding a site that works better with their browser instead. It would be nice if we tried a different tact, and in doing so helped not only ourselves, but the wider community of developers. After all we want the same outcome : to have our work viewed the way we intended, for the minimum amount of work. Cross browser development sucks!

I was thinking the other day that I don’t think I’ve ever heard from a developer that users should switch browsers for security reasons, or any other reason the user would care about. Users don’t care about ACID compliance, or Javascript optimisations or any other technicalities. What they do care about though is security, especially now that mainstream operating systems, manufacturers and financal institutions have gotten the word out about phishing and other vulnerabilities.

  • All the latest browsers support some form of malware protection and anti-phishing protection. This increases user security.
  • All the latest browsers concentrate on process isolation and run time optimisations. This decreases crashes and increases browsing speed.
  • All the latest browsers have been improving standards compliance. This increases the likelihood that more sites will work for the user.
  • All the latest browsers manage their own update process. The user isn’t required to remember to stay up to date in the future.
  • All the latest browsers have the latest patches and updates and latest features. This gives the user the most secure, fastest, and feature packed experience.

We all know that unless you have a very good reason, it’s silly to be running an old browser. However when was the last time you explained the benefits for them personally? Increased security, increased stability, increased speed, more compatibility with other sites and the latest features available.

If you find a better way to sell your clients on spending 5 minutes to upgrade their browser then make sure you spread the word. Every user you convert is a win for the web community and the internet in general!

We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.

Posted in Industry Trends, Inside TFG, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »

Embedding Dynamically Generated Images in Emails with Actionmailer

December 2nd, 2009, by aaron

We recently had to embed images into our emails that were being sent with Actionmailer, and as such we turned to the inline_attachment plugin to achieve this. It very easily parses your mail output and overrides the ActionView path_to_image helper to attach the file and create an appropriate path to the attached image inside the email while splitting your mail into appropriate parts as necessary.

What we needed to do though was embed a dynamically generated image into the email. The image didn’t exist on the file system previously so we couldn’t use the standard image_tag helper that inline_attachment was patching.

So we extended ActionView to include a new tag helper attach_image_file that uses the existing inline_attachment part management and just a properly referenced image. The methods from inline_attachment take care of attaching the file to the email and splitting the mail content into the appropriate parts.

Here’s my code. I just added it into my initializers directory :

module ActionView
  module Helpers
    module AssetTagHelper
      def attach_image_file(file)
        @part_container ||= @controller
        if @part_container.is_a?(ActionMailer::Base) or @part_container.is_a?(ActionMailer::Part)
          basename  = "barcode.gif"
          ext       = basename.split('.').last
          cid       = Time.now.to_f.to_s + "#{basename}@inline_attachment"

          @part_container.inline_attachment(:content_type => "image/#{ext}",
                                        :body         => file,
                                        :filename     => basename,
                                        :cid          => "<#{cid}>",
                                        :disposition  => "inline")

          return ""
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

It did what we need, and allows us to properly inline a dynamic image. You could use similar code to inline pretty much anything that your target mail reader supports. Apple Mail for instance may provide PDF previews.

We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.

Posted in Code, Ruby on Rails, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »

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The boys at The Frontier Group are amazing! For such a relaxed and personable organisation, they have phenomenal technical ability and a rampant professionalism. They have customisable solutions for all of my IT needs and they always deliver, on time and beyond expectation.

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Caudo Machinery

Caudo Group engaged our services to redesign their outdated website. We sent our photographer on-site to capture the essence of their business and turned it into a stunning web design.