S8080 Blog

We are looking to expand our technical development team again and we would love to hear from you if the following brief description sounds about right for you…

• 2 years practical use of .NET
  MS SQL Server experience
  Practical knowledge of CSS / HTML
  Practical knowledge of JQuery / JavaScript
  Knowledge of SharePoint would be good, but not essential
  Basic knowledge of hosting technologies an advantage but not required – must be willing to learn!
  Salary is very competitive and you’ll be working out of SA1 in Swansea.

This is an excellent opportunity to work on some very high profile websites for some great clients (take a look at the Our Work section of our site).

You’ll be part of a very talented and busy team working in a modern environment with all the benefits you’d expect working for a company like S8080.

We work with several CMS platforms including Umbraco, so let us know if you have any experience on this front too.

Feel free to get in touch if you would like more details, or just send your CV for the attention of Matt to jobs@s8080.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

No agencies at all. Thank you.

We enjoyed a visit from Business and Enterprise Minister Edwina Hart last week, who congratulated us on our Number10 open source WordPress website. You can find the full story on the WG News site, but she was kind enough to give us a comment on our recent success.

"Creative Industries is one of fastest growing areas of the Welsh economy and employs more than 30,000 people in Wales.  It’s always good to hear  when  a small  Welsh company  such as S8080   lands  and successfully completes   such   a  high profile contract.

“I congratulate  S8080 on  its  most recent success  and am confident that its work  on the No10 website  will help to  further raise awareness   of our dynamic  Welsh creative industries sector across the UK and beyond."

Thank you Minister!

You can read the Number10 story here.

Late last week, after many months of hard work, we launched the brand new website for the National Assembly for Wales.

Well, I say ‘new’…

Earlier this year, we won the contract to redesign and redevelop the NAfW website www.assemblywales.org, but instead of implementing a new content management system, we would be working into their legacy CMS system. This would give significant cost savings.

Usability

One of our tasks was to improve the usability of the website. We used many sophisticated techniques to ensure it would be easy to navigate. We started with a content audit of the existing site to help us determine the depth and breadth of the site and categorise the types of information that the Assembly needed to present (and the stuff they didn’t!)

Then we developed a suite of personas – based on real people who use the website – and scenarios of use and user journeys for each of these. This ensures that everything going forward is based firmly on a User Centred Design approach. We interviewed many types of users, including AMs, journalists, and members of the public to find our exactly what they needed and how they wanted to use the site.

Information architecture

Once these two stages were complete, we could then use the findings to redevelop the information architecture (site map) and create a set of wireframes that explain each key page in detail and the way the users will interact and travel through the site – making their journey as easy as possible. Wireframes really do help save time and money on all web projects as amendments can be made quickly and cheaply, before the ‘look and feel’ or coding is developed. It’s a very agile and cost effective approach.

Getting creative

Then we moved into the design phase. After consultation, we presented three distinct creative routes. The Assembly project team gathered thoughts and feedback and the final creative direction was decided upon. This design was then implemented into the CMS, and the resulting templates were accessibility tested to ensure everyone would be able to use and enjoy the content on the new site.

Then came the mighty task of applying the design to the content – thousands of pages of information.

After one more round of accessibility testing, the new site was launched without a hitch thanks to the hard work of many people from S8080, The National Assembly for Wales, and our project partners Method4. Thank you everyone, it was an immense task.

You can see the new website at www.assemblywales.org

“We’re very grateful to S8080 for the hard work they’ve put into this project, and we’re immensely pleased with the final product. From the outset, they stood out head and shoulders above their competitors, with their down to earth attitude and excellent project management skills. They took the time to understand our needs as an organisation, and now the result is a clean and crisp design and a new site architecture that is helping visitors to our site find what they are looking for and enjoy the site experience.”

Iwan Williams, Media, Brand and e-Democracy Manager

National Assembly for Wales

Years ago, everyone marvelled at the glut of eZines that started to appear – everyone wanted their brochure converted to the fancy new ‘page-flip’ format that tried to replicate a paper based reading experience on screen.

Then the iPhone and iPad appeared, Flash suddenly became un-loved and everyone thought it was just a bit daft to try and emulate a magazine or catalogue on-line. Things needed to move on.

So we thought we’d give it another go for one of our clients, The Environment Agency. They have this exciting EU project,  ‘Wild Fishing Wales’, a truly amazing world class offering and they wanted to tell people about it in a magazine style format.

So we sat down and designed a new way of doing it for them, based on accessible HTML that works on PC, Mac,  tablets, phones and even iPads. We think it’s beautiful. And being HTML, we could feed in YouTube videos, Flickr streams and Google Maps.

Issue one went out via an email campaign using S8080’s broadcast platform. Our biggest broadcast yet, 380,000 people. It went down very well indeed, from an analytics point of view and from the comments we received – phone calls from perfect strangers saying how much they liked it!

Issue two is going out any day now but pop over to Wild Fishing Wales and take a look for yourself.

Back in August, we announced that S8080 were asked to help with the redesign for the newly launched 10 Downing Street website, http://www.number10.gov.uk/ built in WordPress – the open source web publishing platform. It’s a high profile, high load open source website.

We were absolutely delighted that our modestly sized regional agency was awarded the contract, managed by COI, for what is arguably one of the most high profile Government websites in the world. We have worked hard since starting S8080 in 2000 to build up our experience and reputation and to be recognised at this level makes the whole team very proud.

A very agile and hands-on project management style was called for, to help with the quick turnaround and very busy client!

After visiting the historic office of the British Prime Minister, our User Experience (UX) team set to work refining the way the wealth of information was presented, taking into account the needs of the varied audience types.

We worked hard providing recommendations on the restructuring of the website based around the audience’s needs. This involved prototyping ways of presenting the serious business of the Coalition Government’s policies, ‘Take Part’ initiatives as well as the interactive elements of the website including the history of the building, a timeline of Prime Ministers and much more.

Once the website blue prints (wire frames) had been designed, S8080’s creative team took over. The team visited Downing Street a couple of times, immersing ourselves in the history and details that make this one of the most recognisable buildings in the world. We wanted to show it as a thoroughly modern office but also as a building steeped in history.

We took hundreds of photographs, including the classic ‘10’ that is used on the masthead of the website – an icon that is recognised worldwide.

It was a nerve-wracking couple of days waiting for sign off from the top, but we were confident that we had provided a very well-considered and user centred design. We feel we have achieved the sense of gravitas that the office deserves without it looking like a tourist attraction.

At the end of the day, it’s just another very busy office with lots of toing and froing, as we found out when trying to photograph the door in the gaze of paparazzi on Budget Day!

www.number10.gov.uk

S8080 are incredibly proud to announce that the new Number10 website was designed in Wales – by us!

The new site, which uses the WordPress platform, was launched a couple of weeks ago after an intensive UX, design and build phase.

More info soon.

We are looking to expand our technical development team and we would love to hear from you if the following brief description sounds about right for you…

• 2 years practical use of .NET
• MS SQL Server experience
• Practical knowledge of CSS / HTML
• Practical knowledge of JQuery / JavaScript
• Basic knowledge of hosting technologies an advantage but not required – must be willing to learn!
• Salary is very competitive and you’ll be working out of SA1 in Swansea.

This is an excellent opportunity to work on some very high profile websites for some great clients (take a look at the Our Work section of our site).

You’ll be part of a very talented and busy team working in a modern environment with all the benefits you’d expect working for a company like S8080.

Feel free to get in touch if you would like more details, or just send your CV for the attention of Matt to jobs@s8080.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

A great job for a Junior ASP .NET Web Developer (VB).

We are looking for a talented junior developer to join our technical development team.

Ideally, you will have some .NET experience, but then again, if you are a graduate level and love coding, let us know
In this role, you’ll be supporting, rolling out and in the future ,helping to develop our existing suite of applications and solving technical problems. You’ll be passionate about coding to the very highest professional standards and have an interest in the internet that borders on the obsessive.

Essential Skills

• Beginner knowledge of ASP.NET 2.0  – in VB.Net (or C# if willing to convert to VB)
• Familiarity with Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010
• T-SQL / Basic SQL (and an understanding of the concepts of Stored
• Procedures, Views, Triggers, User Functions)
• Knowledge of Relational Database Design
• Familiarity with SQL 2000/2005/2008 Management Studio an advantage
• Understanding of Object Oriented Programming
• Javascript

Desired but not essential

• jQuery
• AJAX
• CSS
• XML
• XHTML
• Microsoft Office Suite – Specifically Excel and Access

Roles and Daily Duties

• Product Technical Support
• Roll out CMS
• Involvement with the maintenance of S8080 CMS
• QA and testing of in-house technical projects to a high level
• Development of entry level technical solutions (small-medium sized applications)
• Creation of technical documentation (Technical Specifications, User Guides etc)

You’ll be working in our Swansea SA1 offices, a stones throw from the sea, in a fast paced, creative environment with 16 talented people. Ranging from ultra-techies, front end web developers and creatives through to unfeasibly organised project managers and information architects, our team work hard and enjoy what they do – this gives us very happy clients and lots of high profile exciting work to do.

You’ll have a pension, plenty of professional development opportunities, good holidays, flexible working, a state of the art working environment and the chance to work with the sort of clients Welsh agencies only normally dream about. And most importantly, we pay good people well.

Just send your CV and a quick covering email with salary expectations to Matt Howard at jobs@s8080.com

We look forward to hearing from you.

Absolutely no recruitment agencies.

A very happy New Year to you all.

Back in July ‘10, one of our email designs for the 2010 e-Crime Wales summit was featured in the Campaign Monitor gallery.

Just before Christmas, we noticed that it had been picked up by the excellent inspirationfeed blog as one of ‘45 eye-opening examples of email newsletter designs’ – you can find it at number 15.

We are proud to be featured alongside such amazing work.

PS. Take a look at the new year banner we put together for e-Crime Wales if you have a moment (it’ll only be around for a short time) – the site is chock full of useful advice to help businesses protect themselves.

We would like to welcome a brand new client, the Welsh Language Board. We have just completed an email campaign piece for a fascinating viral they are working on. As soon as it’s live, I’ll share it here.

We are obviously very pleased to be working with the Board – they are are an organisation we have longed to work with for quite some time. It’s always a pleasure to work with a team who are passionate about their cause.