The Frontier Group - Blog

iPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking?

February 2nd, 2010, by fitzy

Lately I have been left feeling slightly bemused, possibly even despondent. What about you may ask? The reaction this week to the iPad for one.

The instant it was announced, the concept of jumping on the nearest spaceship and leaving this planet behind was not far from my mind. I mean, who doesn’t love a good argument on the Internet right? But the sheer magnitude of negativity and lack of foresight was astounding. I guess there was a lot of disappointed people who expected the iPad to be something that it was never intended to be, but are we really living in an “all about me” society? More importantly, is that where we want to be?

I would never expect everyone to like such a device and nearly everyone I talk to that doesn’t use an Apple product, hates Apple products. I used to be one of those people too. I grew up with MS-DOS, Windows 2, 3, 95, 98, 2000, XP, then shifted to Linux for the next few years. Maybe a solid Apple product came along at the right time for me, just as all the other competitors were struggling. They’ve since moved on and regained their following again, but I’ll most likely continue down the path which has seen me the most productive in business and life.

But back to my original point. I spent 10 minutes thinking about potential uses for the iPad that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere, and it wasn’t hard to come up with some amazing out of the box solutions. I contemplated writing a post, to join the other millions of bloggers out there but I held back for a while. Eventually Venessa Miemis wrote exactly what I was thinking, but she’s done the hard work citing resources and everything!

If you have a spare ten minutes it’s definitely worth a read, regardless of how you feel about the device. It may turn out to be a game-changer or it may disappear into insignificance 12 months after it launches. But if like me, people want to read some objectivity on a topic, then this is for you.

iPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking?

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.


The Frontier Group joins the Engine Yard Partner Network

January 28th, 2010, by fitzy

Over the last month we have been in negotiations with Engine Yard to join their Partner Network. Today we are proud to announce that we have been accepted into the program and have become Engine Yard’s first Australian Partner. The partnership is a mutually beneficial arrangement that enables us to work together on projects that require the backing of a premier scalable Ruby on Rails hosting company.

We look forward to working with Engine Yard and are excited at the opportunities it will bring in 2010.

Oh, and we get to display a sexy badge :)

Engine Yard

From prnewswire:

With the dramatic increase in the number of Ruby on Rails development firms, Engine Yard has launched the Engine Yard Partner Network to connect customers to a full range of application services for Ruby on Rails including design, development, deployment, and maintenance. Choosing an Engine Yard Partner with Engine Yard products and services helps deliver a highly available, scalable, secure application and a seamless end-to-end experience.

“The ecosystem of application development firms using Ruby on Rails is snowballing as more and more firms discover they can get more done in less time by switching to Rails,” said Marcy Campbell, VP of Sales and Business Development of Engine Yard. “We’re excited to offer our partners a complete, reliable platform for their Rails applications during and after development.”

Partner Network developers create applications using Ruby on Rails because they can deliver better applications faster and with higher quality. They rely on Engine Yard to provide the best platform, technologies, and services to deploy and manage applications in the cloud.

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.


The Sortfolio Experiment

January 20th, 2010, by fitzy

What is Sortfolio?

Sortfolio (the website formerly known as Haystack), is a website where web design firms (and freelancers) can provide the necessary information about their business to a potential client. Instant information such as location, price and style of work are easily found. Sortfolio makes it easy for a potential client to browse multiple web designers all at once and make an informed choice.

Whether this concept will prove to be effective long term is still an unknown. Certainly for companies in Australia it seems to be less effective at the moment. I would imagine that potential customers in Australia probably aren’t using this sort of website or directory, like our American counterparts would be.

We’ve had our free listing on there since the site launched in October and have had no enquiries in that time. Potentially the 11 hits to our website from Haystack last year were all internal.

The paid plan experiment

Sortfolio offers a paid plan for $99 per month. You have access to 6 thumbnails instead of 1, and a larger listing card. Given that there can be a large number of people competing for ad space, this can prove to be effective from a theoretical point of view. You can see the immediate benefit on the Perth-Australia page.

This benefit is less apparent when the search is refined, however there still is an advantage to being a large listing card.

Recently 37 Signals announced another benefit for paid listings. They purchased a slot on The Deck Network for Sortfolio. That gives somewhere between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 ad impressions in a 30 day period. They used to run a static ad in that spot, but now are splitting the ad display 25% static and 75% dynamic. The dynamic ads feature the Sortfolio Pro customers. About 140 companies have Pro listings and the ad is a combination of a crop of the thumbnail as well as linking to the Sortfolio listing.

This means we will also get roughly 15,000 highlighted ad impressions across The Deck Network. This means exposure to sites such as Daring Fireball, A List Apart, 43 Folders, Kottke.org, The Morning News, Ze Frank, Twitteriffic (in app), Tweetie (in app) & Design Observer.

It will be interesting to see over the next 2 months whether this proves to be effective for an Australian company, as well as it seems to be for our US counterparts. You can check out our full listing on Sortfolio and if you are an Australian company (or freelancer) who has had success with Sortfolio, please leave a comment.

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.


JRuby BugMash is in session

January 10th, 2010, by fitzy

JRuby is a 100% Pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. From the folks over at the JRuby project:

The JRuby project has been growing impressively quickly, with frequent releases and a constantly expanding community. There’s a hefty list of impressive users and companies, and the team has been touring the world, trying their best to make it out to everyone who wants to hear and learn about the project.

As with any growing code base though, there’s a need to keep things tidy; frequent releases and speedy development also mean bugs, and things that need fixing—and that’s where we turn to you!

The first ever official JRuby BugMash will take place this Saturday, January 9th through Tuesday, January 12th. The core team will spend the days prior to the BugMash highlighting the specific bugs that are most important—you’ll want to keep an eye out for the JRuby Introsection, which will one of the focuses of the BugMash. Also look in spec/tags for failing RubySpecs for JRuby’s 1.8 and 1.9 compatibility modes. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit (especially in 1.9) for both new and experienced developers. Then, Saturday morning, it’s off to the races! As a small token of our appreciation, in addition to the wonderful satisfaction of having made a difference to the project, we’ll be sending each of the first 100 participants a limited edition JRubyConf Poster.

The JRuby Core Team will be around on IRC channel #jruby throughout the BugMash to help folks get started and to answer questions. Be sure to stop in and say hello!

There’s also a great post on the good and bad of JRuby over at the Engine Yard blog.

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.


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.


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