Articles

A community needs a common passion or value, something that brings the members together. The Contiki Community is not about a passion for travel. It’s not about the product either. Much in the same way that you are not simply “buying a tour,” the Contiki Community is about the Contiki experience. It’s about the hunt for the perfect trip, the rush of making the decision and booking a trip, the buildup as you get closer to your departure, the letting go and immersing yourself in a new culture with new people, the high after you return where you can’t stop talking about what you saw and did, and the burning desire to do it again; or rather it’s about all the feelings you have as you go through the lifecycle of doing a Contiki.

– Allison Beckwith, Planet Argon, on the design vision for the new community pages

What began as a vision between Contiki and the Planet Argon Team became a reality this week as we launched the new Contiki Community pages.

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I bought a Motorola Droid in the summer of 2010. I wanted a smartphone so I could check my email on the go, replace my aging GPS, and browse the internet occasionally. I bought a Droid because Amazon had a great deal (it was basically free), and I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted with it. I rooted it within a week of getting it since that was the easiest way to get the updated version of the Android OS at the time.

I was really happy with the extremely easy and tight integration with all of the Google services I used (email and calendar mostly). But my wife really wanted a smartphone as well, specifically an iPhone. I was against the idea because I knew she’d have questions about how to use it, and without one of my own I’d be in the position of supporting two kinds of devices. When I started working for Planet Argon where everyone has an iPhone, I encountered my first small disadvantage…

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Last night, I was fortunate enough to participate in a dry run of Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner’s WebVisions New York mobile workshop- the somewhat awkwardly titled “Zombie Apocalypse of Devices Preparedness 101.”

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As we look forward to 2012, we’ve also been taking time to reflect on this past year. There are a lot of new faces, a lot of personal stories, and it seems that we’ve been able to squeeze out a lot of projects for both our clients and ourselves.

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Brainstormr is a microsite that works well within the immediacy and simplicity of mobile web use, so we made it into a responsive design.

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We've added McMenamins as a new client! Welcome!

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We’re looking for Ruby on Rails developers in Europe!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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