Basic salary equivalent plus commission.

Please send CVs to cv@ebow.ie

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Michael D Higgins who was three months in office last week spoke recently at the Trinity Economic Forum and his words reminded me of our own work ethic in ebow when producing and running the PRO site in the time running up to the election and indeed on all of our other projects too.

We were lucky enough to be involved with the design and development of the recent websites for the presidential election and referendum. Planning, designing and developing a website or event that will have the country’s media and the public’s attention provided a great opportunity. Because as well as being a great site to work on, it provided us with an opportunity to let us check just how streamlined our processes were, check that our creative juices really were working at full capacity to solve anything that arose and to be the cogs that helped it all run perfectly on the day.

The U.S. might be ok with some line blurring in reporting election results, but as a nation of great communicators, that’s just not our style! So with jokes about each of us electing ourselves as president all out of the way early on, everyone got stuck in to doing what we do best and love, finding nerdy and aesthetically perfect ways to solve any digital challenge that could be thrown at the site during the election.

Top 5 Project Planning Considerations – Sine Gaughan

“As we rebuild and restore Ireland’s reputation abroad, we must highlight the best of our traditions, as well as that wonderful spark of innovation that so defines our national character.”

President Michael D. Higgins

 Know your dates!

This project was very interesting. Not only would we potentially be privy to sensitive government information, our work would be in front of the whole country. To top it off, there was one clear day, on day all eyes would be on us. One date that everything had to be ready. The election was set for the 27th of October 2011. We worked backwards from this date. We allowed as much contingency the far end of the project for third party rss testing and hosting assessments. It was unusual because we out pressure on ourselves to have the first phase of the site ready for August. This was nearly two months ahead of the election day.

Prioritise your feature functionality.

We wanted it all. From detailed data tables to useful Candidate biographies. Our goal was to ensure key data was displayed in an accessible interesting way. We had to be strict and build a website for the Irish people. We still held onto to interactive data maps, fresh colourful charts and comprehensive data tables.

 Plan everything.

Visualise the risks, catalogue potential issues, plan it all. We used our ebow project methodology of simplifying for clarity. This helped us get a really good idea of how everything would work and fit together. In the run up to the election, we had an on site walk through, data input process maps, hosting hotlines, server backup and security facilities coming out our ears. It was not about overspending to over protect the site. Our test plans were rigorous. Stress testing, server testing, UAT (user acceptance testing) ….How will it look on pcs from 1985?

It was about using the best security and hosting providers and planning efficiently to reduce and if possible eliminate the online risks.

 Stay calm

On the day Dublin Castle, was a fantastic buzz of excitement.

The halls and rooms were full of important senior officials, undercover Gardai, high profile journalists all roamed around. We were the last in the line of a long day and countless checks and ticks of the election numbers. People had been counting for hours in the centres around the country. We had little sleep with work ending well past midnight and starting early in the mornings. We knew we still needed to get our job right. We took a few deep breaths and made sure we were happy with our work. As a wrong move on our part would jeopardise all the good work that have gone on throughout the day by others.

 Enjoy it.

We are incredibly proud to have been part of such an interesting project. The months up to the election day we learnt so much about the wonderful protocols and regulations surrounding such an event. On the day we were blown away but how part of the whole process and indeed the country we felt. Half expecting our president to invite us up to the Aras. There was also an impressive display of serenity and decisiveness from our Presidential Returning Officer Ríona Ni Fhlanghaile… We were honoured to be part of it and of course happy that everyone was delighted with our work. Win Win

Top 5 Web Design Considerations – Kerry Lyons

“When I was inaugurated as President of Ireland last year I stated that we must seek to build together an active, inclusive citizenship; I also stressed the importance of citizens of all ages making their own imaginative and practical contribution to the shaping of a shared future.”

President Michael D. Higgins

The overall site colouring would inevitably be a crucial decision, as each political party involved would undoubtedly be associated with their party’s signature colour. So as not to convey any political bias, an understated but sophisticated white base with a textured navy blue formed the dominant head and foot of the site; a colour chosen specifically for its connotations of authority, trust and most importantly, stability.

It was evident that this was most certainly a site that would be visited by all kinds of users, who would be viewing the site in all sorts of screen resolutions. As much as us big-monitor-lovers are trying to eradicate the need for the fold, we simply couldn’t ignore the task of accommodating the crucial content above the fold in this instance. So after separating out every item of required content, we worked out, in priority order, what was essential to see at first glance, and what was permissible to scroll. Then allowing a suitable amount of ‘content peek’ (allowing the user to see a fraction of what’s to come encourages them to scroll) for the lower priority content.

There was a strong requirement for each user to feel a real ease when navigating and discovering content throughout the site. We solved this by providing a clear horizontal navigation across every page, and a consistent secondary navigation on the inner pages, and also by providing detailed, key links on the footer of every page acting as a sitemap. This made the site’s links totally accessible, from everyday, tech-savvy users through to visually impaired users with screen readers.

We were challenged with finding the best way to display the high volume of vote/count data dynamically, as we were responsible for populating the site with live data on the day of the election itself. Through thorough research and a few experiments, we found the functionality and aesthetics of Google Charts was a perfect fit. This allowed us to display the data in a number of engaging, easy-to-read ways; pie charts, bar charts, stacked bar charts and tables.

 Finally, our overriding requirement was to provide an accessible site under the WC3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This involved including the allowance of expanding font sizes, changes in colourings, and providing HTML text alongside every image to ensure no information was unreadable by screen readers. A mighty task you may think?! …Just a day in the life of the ebow design team actually! ; )

ebow has worked on a number of other important cultural Irish sites recently including www.cnci.ie, www.dublinscience2012.ie and themoderns.ie

Have a great Friday and make sure and follow us on Facebook for more…

Brand, web design, development and maintenance of SciFolio.ie

Forfas contracted ebow to move their projectblogger.ie website to the next level. We came up with the new brand SciFolio. This is a Junior Cert tool for all science students.

Built entirely with WordPress, their is a customised user friendly CMS that has a 3 level administrator rights management system.

SciFolio is a portal for junior certificate students to blog about their science projects.With their teachers, students can post photos, videos and write own experiment notes.

It is a secure environment where the student has full control to their work. Their teacher can also review and assess their work safely online.

It is part of the excellent programme by Discover Science & Engineering which is run by Forfas. The underlying driver is the move towards enquiry based learning.

http://www.scifolio.ie

Digital marketing campaign and more to follow…

ebow & Gallery Number One presents - Drive Operation Game by Mick Minogue

The title of this article may lead you to believe we’ve started a babysitting service, we haven’t. We just let some rad artists in to do their thang in the gallery. And they are making the most of it.

We run as ebow and Gallery Number One. It’s a symbiotic union you can read more about here.

We invited local art and design collective For The Love Of in to Gallery Number One for a show and they decided to run an exhibition based on the theme of ‘Progress’. The gallery is open Thursday through to Sunday 10am – 5pm. And if you have been in already it’s worth your while dropping by again as Mick Minogue is gradually illustrating our ceiling. Mick is a self-confessed ‘crafty little beggar’ and working professionally as an illustrator and maker of things. He’s worked on campaigns such as the Undergrowth Movement for Bulmers and represented Ireland in the Secret Wars – an International event where illustrators and graffiti artists battle it out (through drawing) in front of a live audience.

As part of the For The Love Of Progress show Mick is showing his ‘Drive’ themed version of the well-loved kids game ‘Operation’ and as previously mentioned he’s illustrating directly onto the ceiling.

Going back to the childhood pursuits of playing games and drawing on the walls sounds a little more like regression that progression eh? Wrong. Progression, according to our window text based piece by Kathryn Maguire ‘is not possible without deviation from the norm’. We commonly refer to this as thinking outside the box. It’s great to get an artist into our gallery who is humble and honest enough to make work that deviates from the norm by having a bit of fun.

He’s admitted that after watching the film ‘Drive’ he came out of the cinema as influenced as he had the first time he had watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film as a kid. The start to ‘Drive’ is as quietly tense as you will be when you set the timer on Mick’s game and attempt to remove each of the pieces without setting off the revving engine sounds.

As for drawing on the walls, this is no Crayola scribbling. Mick is introducing an awesome, ceiling-sweeping whale complete with nautical tattoos to our gallery, little by little. A whale with tattoos is a form of progress. And it’s progress that the whale is on the ceiling and not just in Mick’s brilliant imagination.

ebow & Gallery Number One

1 Castle Street, Dublin 2

Mick Minogue – The Real Human Being Operation Game from Albert Hooi on Vimeo.

A Whale of a Time

And we’ll be hosting an evening of mince pies and mulled wine soon to celebrate the show and the completion of Mick’s Sistine Whale.

Keep an eye on our facebook page for updates on when that will happen.

Full pics from the FTLO@GN1 launch at Digital Agency ebow’s Gallery Number One!

One of the best launches we’ve ever had….check out more on our Digital Agency Facebook page

Presidential Election Web Design by ebow

Make sure and follow ebow on Facebook for more information on web site launches and then some!