January 27th, 2010, by Matthew
Update – This position has been filled, however we’re always on the lookout for new talent so don’t be discouraged! Send through your portfolio and we’ll keep in touch.
The Frontier Group is a boutique software development company based in West Perth. We have a strong focus on web software, and utilise Ruby on Rails.
Our development team has recently grown to eight staff and we’re looking to take on our first full time designer. Until now we’ve worked with design freelancers and subcontractors. Now we want to make a designer part of our team, allowing our developers to work closely with the interface expert. We need someone who’s part of our team and not just kicking the ball in the same direction.
Is this you?
We don’t micro-manage and we trust your design ability, so you’ll need to have a track record of delivering completed designs. You’ll have a few years commercial experience, probably working in a creative studio doing great but under-appreciated work.
This is your opportunity to jump-ship and drive the creative direction of a young, vibrant and passionate company.
You’ll care about pixel-perfect alignment, and will take pride in the quality of the HTML you use to reflect those designs. You’ll know how JavaScript can be used to enhance the web. You might even care about SASS and HAML, if you’re really cool.
You’ll keep up to date with current trends and care about using modern techniques and practices, as well as tools and technologies.
Your workload will be approximately broken down into:
- 50% web application
- 25% web site
- 25% other design
The other design component will include things like fashion (t-shirt design), art work and even interior design… anything colourful or creative that’s happening in our world will be your responsibility.
Using the right tools is important and we realise that. We don’t have a parent company dictating how we do things or what our “standard operating environment” is – you’ll get to make those decisions with us. We all use MacBook Pros for development, but you might want a new iMac, for example.
What we give you
- $76k per year salary
- 9% superannuation (on top of salary)
- $1k travel allowance per year (parking, bike servicing, public transport)
- Internet and mobile allowance ($80 each per month)
- Opportunities to work from home/flexi-time
- Private office (when we move to the new location mid-year, if preferred)
- Pay reviews every 6 months with no ceiling on earning potential
What you give us
- 38 hours per week
- Your creative genius
How to apply
Send an email to jobs@thefrontiergroup.com.au linking to your online portfolio. Please be clear how much of the design you are responsible for, or if it was a collaborative process with other creative types.
Prepare a list of four sites – two that have elements you like, and two that have elements you dislike. A critique of these, either in person or via the phone, will be part of the second round of interviews.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Inside TFG | 4 Comments »
January 21st, 2010, by Matthew
We’re going through a massive growth phase at the moment, which has seen us double our staff in the last few months. This spurt has been driven by our customers wanting more Frontiersmen to work on their projects. It’s a good problem to have, but it has also exposed a series of considerations.
Our growth until now has been very controlled and organic, in that we have always been reacting to our business’ needs. We have taken on development staff one at a time. This resulted in our team being stretched for a little while before we take on a new hire. For example, when we moved from two directors (and took on Mark, our first employee) it was because Adam and I were working at 150% capacity. When Mark joined us, and we could spread that 300% over three people. As we get bigger, the extra capacity a single person can supply is reduced, relative to the total capacity of the company. This is great because it means we don’t get pushed to 150% anymore, but also means we need to start taking on multiple hires at once.
Late last year we had James and Dan join us, and we’ve just wrapped up our interview process and have hired John, Jacques and Jordan. We’ve gone from five developers to seven, to ten.
Now we’re looking for a full-time designer too, to join our team and balance our logic and structure with creativity and colour.
This raises the following ethical consideration: is it OK to actively head-hunt staff from other organisations? What if they’re your competitors? What if they’re you competitors, but you’re part of a social community? I think there’s two main schools of thought.
Firstly, there’s the attitude that we live in a capitalist world where the dollar rules and everyone’s looking out for themselves. If you can offer better employment opportunities than your competitor, then that’s your commercial advantage. If The Frontier Group is able to offer a larger salary and greater career prospects than our competitors, it’s to our benefit. Is it unethical for us to leverage that advantage?
Counter-balancing that argument, I feel, is the idea that the relationship between a company and their employees is comparable to human romantic relationships. If the pretty girl at the bar has a ring on her finger, it’s not considered appropriate to hit on her. Do you thing that translates?
Are “married” (employed) staff off-limits, or is it a case of “all’s fair in love and war (and HR)”?
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Inside TFG | 10 Comments »
January 20th, 2010, by Adam
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 Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Inside TFG | 3 Comments »
January 13th, 2010, by Aaron
I’m currently getting into using RSpec for testing our controllers on what is turning into a large project. It’s been more than handy because we have a lot of complex scoping to take into account whenever retrieving data. People don’t like to see other peoples’ financial data, mostly because it implies that someone is probably looking at theirs. With this in mind it’s more than important that we know the right data is going to the right places and hence the need for controller testing.
Now most of our controllers require the user to be logged in so writing tests to check this for every controller is annoying and time consuming, more than that it feels dirty. I think this is what some people call a code smell though I’m not up to speed on buzz words. There are also other tasks that are done quite often such as setting up the various types of users we’d like to test as, it would be nice if this were easily put in one place and could be easily pulled in. I guess I was looking for a template of tests that I could share.
It seems that the solution to it is found in Shared Example Groups which I hadn’t heard very much discussion about and it kind of leaves working out how they work to you rather than documenting it too much.
So far I’ve used it simply to make sure that controllers that require are redirecting users appropriately and also for setting up a specific type of user for our system before testing.
I created a directory under /spec/support called example_groups and in there I have a file called login_groups.rb. In that file I have something like the following :
shared_examples_for "customer is logged in" do
before(:all) do
@user = Factory(:customer_user)
@user.customers.push Factory(:customer)
end
before(:each) do
activate_authlogic
OperatorSession.create(@operator)
end
end
Now in my spec files when I have a bunch of tests requiring a logged in customer I will include this little snippet :
it_should_behave_like "customer is logged in"
I get a logged in customer to start playing around with. I have the spec/support/example_groups directory in my include paths for Rspec and so it just all works.
My tests can then start to look like :
describe MerchantsController do
it_should_behave_like "areas requiring login"
context "customer logged in" do
it_should_behave_like "customer is logged in"
... insert other tests here ...
end
end
It means I can swap in another authentication gem/plugin pretty easily and also encapsulates the logic about creating customers, or whatever type of item you want to use, so that if that changes you can swap things in and out with a minimum of fuss.
Just to be clear, example groups aren’t limited to setup tasks or connecting to before/after hooks, you can also include a bunch of tests as well. This allows me to have a bunch of tests to run to make sure that a user does have to be logged in for various controllers and include these tests in on line.
I hope this helps someone, it took a bit of searching and trial and error myself this morning to get it working and find the uses for it that I’ve found. I’m definitely open to better solutions to this sort of issue though.
We are a Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Tags: Rails, rspec, ruby, Ruby on Rails, Testing
Posted in Inside TFG | 2 Comments »
December 3rd, 2009, by Adam
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 Perth web design and web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. Jump to the Ruby on Rails category or contact us.
Posted in Inside TFG, Websites or Tools | No Comments »
Follow Us