As you might be aware, An Event Apart have been running a competition to find the best web app written in 10k or less. For the web-developmentally-challenged among you, (you lucky, lucky souls…), this isn’t a great deal of space to work with, so optimization is the name of the game!
You can see the gallery of apps here. There are some truly amazing examples of what can be achieved with a little creativity, and the standard of app on display is extremely high. (Although with some rock-star calibre developers entering the competition, this was almost to be expected!)
For our own entry, I recreated the game of Video Poker (with graphics from Allan).
If you want to take a look at the uncompressed source code, it’s available on github, under the MIT License.
The Ailsa Craig Hotel came to 360innovate looking to refresh their web presence. As a fashionable, city-centre hotel, they wanted a site that would reflect not only their heritage, but their modern outlook too.
Built using a content management system, the administrators have full control over their site’s content.
You can see the result at ailsacraighotel.co.uk.
In Ryan Florence’s excellent post comparing jQuery’s approach to Mootools’, he makes a number of interesting comparisons about each framework’s approach.
One area where jQuery provides an elegant solution is its use of anonymous functions to set DOM properties, as shown in the following snippet.
This is something that I certainly missed when working with Mootools, but fortunately there’s an easy, quick solution.
Ryan proposes the use of the setEach plugin to solve this issue, but to me, this doesn’t seem necessary. You can work around the issue by using a function that executes immediately, as follows.
The key here is the extra pair of parentheses after the function definition, which forces the function to execute straight away. Simple, quick, and it gives the same functionality as the jQuery equivalent without having to add the overhead of a plug in.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for site launches in the 360innovate office!
Multi Table Tournament Poker are a company that hold poker tournaments across Scotland. They hold regular (nightly) events, as well as regional and national tournaments. They came to 360innovate looking for a complex bespoke website development, involving many different league tables, a content management system, and a forum.
The main aims for this site were to ease the administrative burden on MTTP’s staff (allowing them to expand their business more easily in future), and to provide a focus for their already-strong community of players.
MTTPoker have big plans for the site, and planning for phase 2 of the development is well under way!
You can check out the site at mttpoker.com.
Regular visitors to our site might have noticed that we have tweaked the header/menu area this morning.
There are a couple of reasons for this little facelift. Firstly to tie the main menu closer to the rest of the design from a visual perspective.
The second reason is to prepare the way for future additions to site which are part of the phased approach we took when creating the site.
When we first put the site live a few months back we did so with great pride but we also had many ideas during the build that had to be shelved due to time constraints (pesky clients!).
Along with the visual changes we also had certain tweaks and additions to the site which needed rolling out so we decided to bundle them into one update.
We’ll keep you posted when we make further additions to the site.
Following the successful launch of the Cathcart and District Housing Association we are pleased to announce that 360innovate have been working with Knowes Housing Association to build a new website for the public sector organisation.
Built on a content management system, the Knowes Housing Association website focuses upon providing as much information and support as possible to current and future tenants.
You can visit the site at knowes.org.
It’s very common for us to show and hide vertical menus when developing sites. This idiom is particularly common on sites with a lot of submenus, such as e-commerce shopping carts.
Since it’s a technique we use so frequently, we decided to write a little jQuery plugin to make life easier for ourselves. This plugin takes nested unordered lists and turns them into expandable and contractable menus.
The plugin has the following features:
- Dual licenced under GPL / MIT licences – do what you want with this code (as long as you leave the licence intact!)
- Lightweight (~2Kb packed)
- Keyboard accessible, basic WAI-ARIA support. Usable with JavaScript switched off.
- Easy to use and deploy
- Configurable through CSS, callback functions and numerous options
Please note that this plugin optionally uses of Klaus Hartl‘s excellent jquery.cookie.js plugin.
You can download the plugin here, and view the docs, and an example here.
Drum Central is Scotland’s leading provider of drum kits, accessories and hardware in Scotland.
Selling their wide range of drumming products both offline and online Drum Central appointed 360innovate to redevelop their existing website with the intentions of making the brand image more current and the website easier to administer.
360innovate proposed an ecommerce shopping cart that allows shoppers to find their desired product with ease, purchase gift vouchers to spend instore, sign up for newsletters and connect with the brand via social media. The final result is a vibrant website that is sympathetic to the rock genre and information rich providing visitors to the website with a wide array of content to aid and enhance their shopping experience.
Visit the Drum Central website.
Like what you see then get in touch with 360innovate today.
