We’re looking for Ruby on Rails developers in Europe!
Rails Developers in Europe
13 Nov 2011
Articles
Researching Product Reviews Across the Web
7 Nov 2011
How well do you rate?
Have you ever made a decision based on someone else’s recommendation? Of course you have. According to a Nielsen survey
“nine in every 10 Internet consumers worldwide (90%) trust recommendations from people they know, whilst seven in every 10 (70 percent) trust consumer opinions posted online.”
This means 70% of us have at one time used a recommendation, by someone we’ve never met. Might be a strong enough reason to focus on building this type of feedback mechanism for your website.
Contiki's New Homepage Design
4 Nov 2011
Contiki is the worldwide leader in tours for 18-35’s. This summer, they asked us to update their homepage to be more relevant for their users. They wanted more interaction and to organize many quick bits of information for potential travelers. The presentation near the bottom and middle parts of the homepage felt unorganized, and we sensed it wasn’t working as an introduction to Contiki.
Contiki’s homepage needs to create interest in the tours, draw potential travelers deeper into the site, and sell the brand as the best option for holidays. We spent a lot of time planning on how to help Contiki make a great first impression. Not everyone who lands on the Contiki homepage knows what Contiki is and what they have to offer.
Migrating from our projects from LESS to Sass
2 Nov 2011
When I joined the team here at Planet Argon, LESS was being used to code and compile the current CSS files. When a new client project came along, we started the transition to using Sass. The decision was made to use Sass when it was included in Rails 3.1. Being a Rails shop, we wanted follow the conventions that were being advocated by leaders of the Rails community. The differences between the syntax of Sass and LESS are minor, but the process of transitioning our largest project to SASS has had its issues.
Halloween pumpkins
1 Nov 2011
We carved pumpkins yesterday, and Gary took photos!
Can you guess who made each of these?
Our new lockers
28 Oct 2011
Finding the right design for Contiki's Trip Finder
29 Sep 2011
With more than 200 itineraries in over 40 countries, finding the perfect trip with Contiki can be daunting if you’re not given the right tools. In collaboration with Contiki, our latest deployment of Contiki’s Trip Finder adds more functionality, improves the design, and has some added perks.
Designing the RCX Trail Camera System website
27 Sep 2011
Leupold & Stevens has been designing, machining, and assembling precision optical instruments for a century. They recently expanded their hunting lineup with the addition of an RCX Trail Camera System to track animals for hunting.
The RCX Trail System comes with a remote camera that you can place anywhere and a controller/viewer that allows you to see what that remote camera sees. This system allows the user to find targets they wouldn’t normally be able to see from their position.
Leupold came to us to make a microsite for the launch of the RCX Trail Camera System. Leupold is a local company, and it’s always a pleasure collaborating with clients in person for a project. We went with a sales sheet model for how to present the product on the website. We felt Leupold’s potential RCX customers would want a simple explanation of the products, large photos to view, and full technical specifications for evaluating their purchase.
Evolving Contiki's print brochure order forms
26 Sep 2011
Contiki is the worldwide leader in tours for 18-35’s and operates in over 40 countries around the world. For more than fifty years, Contiki has primarily relied on print brochures to allure and entice young adults to explore the globe. The printed brochures provide detailed and photographic overviews of the many available tours and benefits of going Contiki, however they do not provide the same flexibility and accessibility of an always up-to-date website.
Regardless, Contiki still has a large customer base that prefers to flip through a physical brochure just like many of us do with our annual Ikea catalog. While we cannot share the correlation between print brochures and purchasing decisions, there is still a significant percentage of customers that use the printed brochure to decide which product to purchase. So it was critical that we improve the user interaction to increase leads here.
Contiki Personalized eBrochures
6 Jul 2011
Contiki is the worldwide leader in tours for 18-35’s and operates in over 40 countries around the world. For more than fifty years, Contiki has primarily relied on print brochures to allure and entice young adults to explore the globe. The printed tour brochures provide detailed and photographic overviews of the many available tours and benefits of going Contiki, however they do not provide the same flexibility and accessibility of an always up-to-date website.