Development
Even as interactive development plays a bigger and bigger role in the life of a brand, many agencies still keep their creative and interactive departments separate. Here, we consider them to be one and the same.
It’s a great feeling to have writers, designers and developers dreaming up ideas together. Sure, we have our disagreements from time to time, but working them out as they arise makes us all better at what we do. And that makes the work better, both creatively and functionally.
Here, our developers share their knowledge. (They’re pretty cool like that.) But it’s not really sharing if you don’t join in the conversation, so dive in. They LOOOOVE talking about this stuff.
So what is NewCity Labs?
Our bread and butter are following through on ideas; making "What if we could...?" into something real. We do it for our clients every day. Most good ideas happen through bad ideas or the need to make our lives a little easier. NewCity Labs is about seeing good ideas come to light and learning through exploration. Everyone has ideas, they come to us usually when we aren't trying to have them – in the shower, in line at Starbucks, pumping gas. What we seldom do is push them to the next step…
Guest Lecturing at Radford
Somehow I had to make this interesting.
Glenn and I visited Emanuel Arnold's Web design class at neighboring Radford University Monday evening to talk about what our web development and production processes are. After about a thirty minute overview of what it takes to design and build a web site, his class surprised me with just under an…
What you’re selling vs. what they’re seeing
Deane of Gadgetopia has written an excellent post on one of the communications / sales pitfalls of content management systems. Clients and sales prospects probably don't understand the difference between what a CMS gets you naturally and what you have to custom-develop one to do, so it can be dangerous (concludes Deane) to sell a CMS to a client…
Developing in CakePHP
Over the last year or so, NCM has begun utilizing a tool called CakePHP to build some of its websites. CakePHP is a PHP-based flexible framework which allows developers to quickly build web applications in a manner similar to Ruby on Rails. It has a large, very active community and is based on free, open source projects. Because of this, support…
Better Know a Function: strtotime() (PHP)
I've spent many a sleepless night working with dates in programming. Few things as basic as dates strike fear into a developer's heart. On the surface they seem just like any other component of an application that is easily overcome given the slightest bit of thought and some basic math. However, this 5-minute problem quickly turns into a migraine…
Why We Use Firefox
Like most web professionals we make our web sites using the Firefox browser, then circle back just before release and make sure everything works in other browsers. An unusual choice given that somewhere between 70% and 80% of web users still use Internet Explorer. It makes more sense to work on the platform most people are using, then tweak the…
