Utilising the fantastic Magento 1.4.* a new site has been entirely rebuilt from scratch for Westside Music Centres (WMC Music)

Well, it's been a lot of work for all involved (myself, all the staff at WMC Music and the team at NuBlue Hosting), but we have finally launched a pretty exciting new online store that makes shopping for muscial instruments a much friendlier experience. As well as stocking literally thousands of products, the site offers amazing prices and tries to be as informative as possible for the end user.

The idea has been to strip back the huge, glossy adverts throughout and to just get customers where they want, as quickly as possible. This has influenced design decisions, development decisions and has required a certain degree of tweaking from the hosting pros.

This is just the start, as there is a plan in place to grow the site steadily both in terms of products and search engine awareness, as well as extra features such fully-skinnable pages for pretty much any page we want, a well developed system for maintaining consistent security updates, newlsetters, app development... the list goes on!

Some fancy new bits...

All of the this couldn't have been achieved without the help of the fantastic development work at Varien Magento on Magento, and for me this has been a much better Magento build than using the early versions, as the codebase feels more solid, and there is now more sanity in the development process! I have even gone out on a limb on this store build, and built my own modules to make sure the site achieves exactly what we want, such as the custom category bestsellers section above.

And some more...

No more do we have a large shopping basket at the side of the page. Why would we want it there, when we could be selling products there? So say hello to the nice little cart at the top of the page.

Anyway, enough reading about it - go see it at http://www.wmcmusic.co.uk

After almost 7 years of building sites for photographer Nigel Riches, together we decided to dump using Flash and build a site in HTML5 and jQuery.

This isn't necessarily a big naughty-finger-salute to the Adobe Camp, as I still love Flash sites, and working in AS3. However, when I was given the opportunity to work with whatever medium I wanted, I decided to use a bit of experimental AJAX/jQuery and I marked the page up in HTML5.

Sadly I'm not using any of the fun new features of HTML5's real features (like video embedding, canvas, client databse etc), but just getting used to some new tags (like on this site too!), but I have enjoyed working the same problems out as I would have in Flash, but this time in JavaScript. This means that finally, we are able to see Nigel's incredible work on non-Flash devices such as iPad, iPhone etc which is great!

The concept behind the site was to recreate a traditional lightbox, so you can drag your way around, find and image and view it. Simple. As it should be when viewing photography. Using some great jQuery plugins (view the site source for more info) I was able to get a really nice feel to the system.

Over the years Nigel's work has got more and more colourful, as he has progressed into the "posh magazine" arena. It has been like a breath of fres air to now attack the site as a huuuuge wall of colour.

Anyway, check it out at: http://www.nigelriches.co.uk

After a lengthy redesign and redevelopment process, we are now in the final stages of getting V4 of the WMC Music website to production status!

It's just really a case now of dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's, but we will be launching the new WMC Music Store in the next week. The new store has been completely re-written using the only choice of e-commerce software for a site this size, Magento.

There are plenty of custom modules in this site and I have tried to keep the design as simple and logical as possible. We have a kick-ass new menu for it too - watch this space...

Over the last few months I have been working off and on with leading technology company Vistair, to help develop some new digital tools for their airline clients. I have helped them to develop their Flight Briefings products that enable pilots to view their flight paths and conditions before flying them, and also I have helped develop an interactive quiz for cabin crew.

Vive la revolution! After a very long period of development, the all-new version of ModX - Revolution has arrived.

This is not just simply an upgrade from ModX Evolution, this is a complete rebuild from the ground up, and no wonder it has taken the team at ModX so long to develop this. I can tell you first hand that it is a beautifully engineered system and for me, blows most of the competition for PHP CMSs out of the water as it works just as I would hope.

I have already blogged about the reasons for using it and I just now say to people, get out there and download it!

Once again a huge contratulations to Ryan Thrash and all that have poured their hearts into this project as many, many people will benefit from this and probably forget to appreciate the hardwork that others have put in!