Recently a few people have been asking us about our workflow and what hardware and software we use, so we have decided to give you an overview of our current workflow from initial enquiry to signing off the project. We have worked hard to test and evaluate our workflows as much as possible to get our projects complete to the highest of standards and to the set deadlines required.

Hardware

I currently run a MacBook Pro 13″, 2.4GHz, 4 GB RAM, running Mac OSX 10.6.3 (snow leopard), Windows XP SP3 & Ubuntu 9.10. Most of our work is done on this machine running Mac OSX and it has become a very reliable machine.

I also have an iPhone 3GS, running iPhone 4.0 Beta 4. This device picks up emails, calls and also works with some of our software (see below).

We also run a Windows machine for testing purposes only, which is an older Dell laptop.

Software

When we first receive a new project, either through email, phone or face to face, we set up the project on our Project Management System, for this we use MarketCircles Daylite. This is a truly amazing program, it handles all of our clients information, project details, tasks and allows us to keep everything together.

Once the project has been given the go ahead, it is exported from Daylite to another MarketCircle product, Billings. This is also a truly amazing product! From here we are able to set up an estimate of the work and tasks to be completed, and then record the actual time we spend on each section of the project.

All of our design and creation work is done on the Adobe suite of applications, we currently have the CS5 Masters Collection installed, which is a brand new release, and we are loving it! We start of with quick prototyping on Fireworks and Photoshop, and then move to the appropriate program from there, Illustrator for printed design and Dreamweaver for online work. Using Photoshop and Fireworks we can create images needed for the site and make the site come alive with Dreamweaver.

During the project the status of the work is kept updated through Billings and Daylite. When we are out of the office, our iPhones run Billings and Daylite apps, which allows us to time offsite work for the invoice and also keep track of anything that needs doing at the time through Daylite.

Throughout the project our work is uploaded to our servers, or if hosted with another company, theirs! All of our design work is now uploaded to our labs and stored in backup online and offline in our office.

When the project is completed and signed off, an invoice is created using Billings and uploaded to our client area of our website. From here on in it is up to the client, when we receive payment the status is updated in Billings and also on our client area and we start the whole process again!

I hope this answered a few questions you have been sending us!

That’s all for now.

J

A nice little video from the ’90s, pretty much shows why we use Macs!

‘Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.’

That’s all for now.

J

Last week Manchester Cathedral hosted the Annual Deans’ Conference. This event takes place every year at a different host city, this year the host Cities where Manchester and Blackburn. Deans of Cathedrals all over the country descended on Manchester to take part in meetings and learn more about Manchester and the surrounding area. The theme of the conference was Regeneration, Manchester being a prize example of this. The conference had guest speakers from Manchester City Council, BBC North and Salford Central Regeneration, all of the Deans seamed to fully enjoy the conference and get a great deal that they could take away with them to their respective Cities.

With our on going partnership with Manchester Cathedral we were asked to firstly produce the booking form for the event. This would be sent out to the Deans from around the country and would need to be easy to fill in but also gather as much information as possible about the attendees and what they would like to do with their stay in Manchester. The feedback from the form we produced was great, it allowed to office staff to process the data quickly and gather all the information they needed in one place.

We were also asked to produce a simple menu for the conference farewell dinner, held on the Wednesday night in the Cathedral itself. The menu included a running order, the menu, a small biography about the guest speaker Dom Antony Sutch and a page for sponsors of the event. The menu was finished with a cream card outer and a plain white inner, including the sheild for the Cathedral and a clean finish.

The menu was produced so that each member of the conference dinner had a copy and the feedback from the menu was great. The meal went down really well and the overall evening was a success. We look forward to working with the Cathedral for more projects of this type.

That’s all for now.

J

Recently we have been working on a few projects that have required some rather complicated CSS scripting. For those who don’t know (or don’t care to know) CSS is a file that changes the way a website displays, and tells the web browser how to render the content of the site. CSS has been around for many years and is now the basis of any website that is being created, it allows the site to be better designed and allows modern browsers to load the site much faster.

The operative word in this last sentence was ‘modern’. Over the years website design standards have changed for the better, creating standards for web design and site rendering has meant that sites can be created faster as they usually look the same on each browser on each operating system. Nine years ago this wasn’t the case, this is when Internet Explorer 6 came out, a massive upgrade from its predecessor, it quickly became the most used browser in the world. It rendered pages fast, was easy to use and looked pretty good (for a Microsoft program!). But the main problem with it was that the Internet was changing too fast, and it soon became outdated. This is now a massive problem, as people are still using IE 6, a 9 year out of data piece of software that has no place in our new modern Internet. Keeping all of our sites viewable in IE 6 is a massive job, and requires a lot of extra work that could be a lot better spent on other things.

For example, to get our Standards Compliant website to look correct on IE 6 we have to load a completely new CSS file, which has had to be written just so that IE 6 works. In other sites, we have had to do the same, and in some more advanced sites, javascript has to be used just to get pages looking nice. We have decided that this shouldn’t be the case any more and have pledged to the Bring Down IE6 Cause. IE 6 has massive security flaws, the government of Germany and France have both publicly warned against using IE6 as it has so many problems and can put you at risk of identity theft. Microsoft have said they will support Windows 2000 (which only allows IE6 and below to run) until this year, so maybe its time to update your OS is your running 2000 still. (or get a Mac!)

All it takes is for people who are using IE to go to Microsoft’s website and download a newer version, IE8 is currently the newest one. You might  even get an automatic update about upgrading quite a bit which you just choose to ignore, don’t ignore it this time. And as you are doing this, we actually recommend you use a different browser totally, Safari, Firefox and Opera are all a lot better and much faster.

This blog will have told you if you need to update your browser, so if you saw the message, follow the links and get yourself upgraded, it will take 10 minutes maximum!

We want to make it clear that we are NOT stopping developing and coding for IE6 at this time, unlike a few companies, but we hope that one day we can.

That’s all for now.

J

Over the weekend we have been tinkering with our website a little. You probably won’t notice the difference, maybe just a few more icons in the bottom corner (see below!) but nothing major. That’s a little strange as we have just completely redesigned the site from the ground up.

So what have we done? Well, to start off with the navigation is now completely different, each page is now its own page, rather than a variable as it was before. And the main difference is that our website now includes no tables at all (apart from a few in the client area to show data). It has been totally re-designed using just standard compliant CSS, which has a few advantages.Firstly the pages will load a lot fast, and also the website will be viewable through every browser past and present, and also to screen readers for the visitors with a visual impairment.

This change took quite a long time, and at times was very fiddly, but we are very pleased to have made the transformation, which will also make it easier for us to update the site as required. We hope to be changing many of our older sites to a new table-less design in the near future to update them for the current time.

You may also have noticed a few more items in the footer, firstly our new terms of service, which list our terms and conditions of work and what our website expects of you, lots of legal words and very boring to read, but important never the less! We also have added a few more links on the footer, including LinkedIn, an RSS feed to our blog and a YouTube link to our profile so that you can keep updated with our goings on. The footer also states that the site is table-less (a nice touch we thought!).

This change is just one of the ways we keep up with the times, and has helped us to realise the need for this type of design in the modern time. We hope to continue our work to make our website run even faster to everyone.

That’s all for now,

J

We are pleased to announce the launch of the X-Fire Design Labs. The labs is the area of our site that we have set aside for current developments and work in progress. Many of our clients have been asking for this for a while, and we have finally found a great way of implementing it. It allows us to showcase our current experiments, and creates an easy place for all our clients to find their projects that we are currently working on.

The Labs can be accessed by visiting labs.x-fire.co.uk or using the link on the main website. Each client will have a folder with their current work in, which can be password protected if you would like. All of the artwork we create, and pages we code, will be put into these files so that you can download anything you need right from our website. When a new website is being coded it will be uploaded here for testing and proofing before uploaded to the final server, this gives us chance to make sure that everything is working great before we go live.

In the coming months you will see this area of the site quickly fill up, as more and more projects come in. We will also be experimenting with a few projects of our own, which will appear at some time so keep a look out!

Thats all for now, I would also like to take the chance to wish you all (a little late) happy New Year, 2010 is going to be great!

J

X-Fire Design has been working around the world for some time, with clients all over Europe and the UK, as well as the USA we have become a very well respected company with our clients. With this in mind we have decided to expand a little, starting with our website, which can now be viewed at www.x-fire.co.uk and www.x-fire.net. (We tried for .com but someone already has that!) This will allow us to be shown in search listings around the globe, and hopefully mean that more people visit our sites and see what we can do for them.

With this in mind we have also set up a new server to make our sites load even faster. Due to this we have to make a few changes to some of the sites we host. New DNS will need to be added to some of our domains to get the full use of this server. We will make any changes to the domains which are registered with us, if you have any other domains that need changing you will get an email letting you know what needs changing in the next week. We hope that this doesn’t cause any disruption and we will do our upmost to keep all of our sites up and running.

Let us know if you have any questions

J

Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Myspace, they are all great websites with millions of visits every day. In recent months all of these companies have started to produce some features aimed at companies and brands helping them to get their word out. This means that there are hundreds of new ways to tell your prospective clients what you are doing at that very moment.  We have started using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for ourselves and some of our clients, this has been a great success and has allowed us to generate new clients and new interest in the company.

Twitter

Twitter is a great little site, well I say little, it gets over 100 people joining the site every day, with well over 5 million accounts world wide, it has become quite a phenomenon. The site simply asks ‘What’s happening?’ and allows you to sent a ‘tweet’ of 140 characters to anybody who wishes to follow you. At this very moment, according to TweeSpeed Twitter is averaging 26304 tweets per minute. That is pretty amazing!

Twitter also has an API which allows developers to create applications, websites, mobile apps and more to integrate Twitter, you might have seen some of this around our site with our streams, and we also use a few different programs, on our iPhones and Desktops to keep us updated with Twitter and post to it.

So what do we use Twitter for? Well we use it to keep people updated with the company, post links to new blog posts, and also make new friends. It also helps us to update our clients on any server problems, new hints and tips and any offers we have on at the moment. It is an incredible platform and we highly recommend it to our clients who are looking to expand their business.

Follow us on Twitter here >> www.twitter.com/XFire_Design

Facebook

Facebook has been around for a while now, started in a student house to keep in contact with the rest of his class at school. It soon became a world wide success. The site boasts on it’s own statistics page that it has over 350 million active users. That is actually a crazy number, impossible to get your head around it if you think about it. It also states that the average user spends 55 minutes on the site each day, this is also an impressive figure. So with all that user presence it is not surprising that many major companies have joined the site recently to promote their products and services.

Facebook allows a company to create a page, which then allows users to become fans of your company, find out what it is about, get updates, blog information, upload pictures, give reviews and a lot more. This tool means that a start up company can quickly get new clients, and build up a great online reputation. The site also makes it really easy to create personalised adverts, which will be displayed allowing users to join your page and tell them who else is joining. This ads come in quite cheap for the amount of exposure you gain.

Our Facebook page is relatively new, but we use a service call TwitterFeed to send all of our Tweets to our Facebook page. This means that both of the networks are in sync in keeping our ‘fans’ informed. We hope to grow the page and include more information very soon, it will become a great resource.

Visit our Facebook page here

YouTube

YouTube was developed in 2005, by a few employees of PayPal who wanted to share some videos of a family dinner. Over the years, and a nice acquisition by Google Inc. it now reports that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute to it servers. Millions of viewers and registered users view thousands of hours of video every hour, with millions of comments being made on the videos each day it is easy to see why it is such an important network for companies to get in on.

We have had a YouTube ‘Channel’ for a while now, we use it to host some of the videos on the Manchester Cathedral Visitor Centre site. We are starting to use it more and more now though, with ideas of instruction guides for our services, help with our client area and for promotion.

Visit our YouTube Channel Here >> www.youtube.com/user/XfireDesign

We are starting to roll out more Social Networking solutions to our clients everyday, so if you would like a hand or some advice to get you started then get in touch!

That’s all for now.

J

We have just updated our Client Area to V1.4. This is a big update, mainly to the support system. Before this update the Client Area included a form which could be submitted to send an email to us, with information about a problem or concern. We have got rid of this frankly rubbish solution and have integrated a fully functional support desk.

The support desk allows our users to create a support ticket for a relevant department, keep up to date with support announcements and also look at articles in our knowledge base, which is currently being written. The knowledge base will be filled with common problems, server settings, and quick solutions. The system will search the knowledge base for similar problems before it creates a ticket to keep down the number of tickets created for common problems, we hope this means our support can be used to its full efficiency.

All of our present Client Areas have been added to the system, you can access it by clicking on Support once logged in. Any new users will be added to the system when their accounts are created. Guest tickets can be opened when emailed to support@x-fire.co.uk

We hope that you enjoy using the system as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.

J

The smartphone market has been taking off for the last three years, with devices like the G1, iPhone and the up and coming PalmPre offering you a pocket computer, MP3 player and full Internet in your pocket when ever you want where ever you want. This has been a massive break through for the tech savvy people around the world. No more need for Internet cafes, slow dial up modems on phones or having to wait till you get home to find the latest news, read your emails, or in the case of students, check your facebook!

Recently we have been researching these markets, and in particular how the built in web browsers handle normal content. We did this as all our websites aim to be compliant with all the new web standards so that our sites are viewable to the highest possible audience. This means we want our sites to look amazing whether your viewing it on a 50″ plasma screen, or a 3″ iPhone screen.

Our research showed that most of the mobile browsers around are pretty good, with a lot of them holding up to all the standards that we would expect. The main difference in them is the way that they use navigation and how they handle flash. Most mobile browsers now are touch screen, which means that you navigate by tapping the screen, this is great, up until you come to a drop down menu or something that responds to a rollover behaviour.

Flash on the other hand just doesn’t work on most of the phones and products we tested, this doesn’t really effect us as we try to use as little flash as possible, mainly because it can be very distracting to the viewer of the site. There is nothing worse then going to a site and not knowing what to do to get the information you want because you have dancing pictures and flashing colours all over the place.

We tested all our sites on the G1 and iPhone and found the results where very good, the sites look great on both phones, and navigation is mainly easy. We edited some of our sites so that they view better on these screens, but it was a lot easier than we had expected. All our sites from now on are going to be tested and written to be compliant with most mobile platforms so that our clients can get the most users to their site possible.

That’s all for now.

J

PS. I wrote this on my iPhone while sat on the train!