One Year On: Happy Birthday Parallax!
They say time flies when you’re having fun, and what an incredible amount of fun we’ve been having over the past year. This month sees the anniversary of when our digital agency underwent a complete rebrand to become Parallax.
We’ve seen some of our biggest projects out the door, new relationships established with some fantastic new clients, and a whole host of amazing people welcomed to our team. It’s been pretty amazing.
Let’s take a look at some of our highlights:
Yorkshire County Cricket Club and Match Day Mode
Over the past year, we’ve been really lucky to work with the prestigious Yorkshire County Cricket Club as their digital agency. Back in November we launched their new responsive website, which has proved to be a great success.
After working to a very tight deadline, we produced a website that brought together information on YCCC, fixtures, and an integrated single login system for users making it far easier to purchase tickets and other merchandise.
The YCCC project grew vastly in April this year with the introduction of the revolutionary Match Day Mode, just in time for the start of the cricket season. Match Day Mode transforms the homepage of the YCCC website into a powerful live scorecard featuring the overall score, who’s batting, who’s bowling, amount of runs, balls played, and even how the weather is doing. It also shows live Tweets so you can get the lowdown from YCCC themselves as well as a link to the BBC’s live radio commentary.
Andy Fitch, Parallax Director and lead developer on the project, said:
“We’re delighted to have worked on something as special as Match Day Mode. We’ve never seen anything like it in the cricket world, it’s a fantastic innovation for Yorkshire County Cricket Club and reflects the club’s forward thinking and ambitious attitude. We’re really proud of it and hopefully it can be something for Yorkshire’s fans to be proud of too.”
Lemoncake
Lemoncake are a startup that are set to redefine the production music industry. To bring you up to speed, production music is used across a variety of radio programmes, TV and films, often as background music or to set the tone.
In one of our largest projects to date, we developed a new production music library with an intuitive interface that uses cutting edge technology. Using a bespoke HTML5 audio player and sliders that gradually change the tone, speed and feel of a track, we’re really pleased with how it’s turned out.
James Hall, lead developer on the project said:
“The sliders can gradually change the tone, speed and feel of a track, ensuring that the sound that listeners search for is the sound that they find. By choosing a genre of music and shaping the result with the four sliders you get exactly the outcome you want. It’s the perfect solution for finding a track and we’re really proud of the outcome.”
City Car Club
The past year also saw the launch of an iOS app that we’ve worked hard to design and develop for our friends at City Car Club, a nationwide hourly car rental company. The app allows users to locate their nearest vehicle, book it, as well as lock and unlock it.
Louis Saville, lead designer on the project said:
“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for the user to be able to find their nearest car and book it, with a simple and clean design. We integrated it with Google Maps so you already know how to use the map, along with a simple booking form below featuring times, as well as the type of vehicle required. To give it a personal touch, we implemented the amount of miles a user has driven to date, the amount of CO2 saved and weather in your local area.”
Town Centre Car Parks
Parallax have been working with our friends over at Town Centre Car Parks for a while now and over the past year we’ve really seen the online side of their business blossom into something fantastic.
From superb search engine rankings and media coverage, to successful online season ticket sales, it’s been a smash hit year. In the first quarter of 2014 we launched a prebooking system with TCCP that allows customers to book their parking for events at the First Direct Arena in advance. It’s proved to be a resounding success and we’re now planning together to integrate prebooking further into the business.
With a lot of exciting things happening behind the scenes at Town Centre Car Parks, the future is looking very bright. Watch this space!
New Team Members and a Bigger Office
In the past year the Parallax has team changed a lot. However, this is all for the better. With our development and digital marketing teams increasing in size and welcoming some unbelievable talent, we’re excited about what the future holds. We’ve seen a couple of team members move on but the team we now have in place is our best yet. We’ve even brought in an office manager to keep us all in line!
We also moved to a new, larger office to accommodate our awesome team.
Introducing Bar Parallax
Friday beers are something that our team always relish. Whether we ended up slaving away on Friday evenings in the office with beers delivered from the excellent Latitude, or if we managed to sneak off for a few pints at Calls Landing, the team always enjoy letting off a bit of steam when the weekend rolls around.
2014 saw the introduction of the one and only Parallax beer tap. After throwing a few ideas around the office, Lawrence, Adam and Barnaby constructed our very own well-loved bar. Hand-built out of wood with gas, pump and a flash cooler installed, our team are now rewarded with a selection of kegs throughout the week. Featuring everything from Amstel, Peroni and Moretti to German craft lagers, we love it!
Swing by for a drink sometime!
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Hisense
In March, we were thrilled to announce the launch of a brand new website for Chinese electronics manufacturer, Hisense. Over here in the UK, Hisense are completely new to the market, however they have a global annual revenue of over $15 billion. They’re the fifth largest television manufacturer in the world and recently entered the tablet market with their Sero 7 and Sero 8 devices.
Eager to launch their impressive range of fridges, televisions, and commercial appliances in a competitive UK marketplace, Hisense required a new website to showcase these products. We designed and developed a responsive website to work across all devices using our Expose CMS. We created an intelligent product builder that allows the Hisense team to easily update the website, an informative support area, and much more.
Jack Sails, project manager on the Hisense build:
“The best thing about working on a project for a company like Hisense was that we were making a site for products that would actually appear in people’s homes. It was really exciting to be able to combine their innovative technology and our forward thinking user-orientated design to make a site which really brings their products to life.”
A new website for Onyx
Earlier this year we launched a new website for Onyx who provide superior IT solutions to businesses across the UK. Offering an impressive range of services such as Cloud Hosting and Colocation from their five state of the art UK-based data centres, we were excited to work with them.
We developed a new website featuring a great user experience, bespoke iconography, and clear calls to action to promote their constantly evolving range of products and services. We also spent a few days on some new professional photography for the team and the data centres themselves to ensure that Onyx were being represented as the forward-thinking company that they are.
Increased focus on Content, Digital Marketing and PR
Here at Parallax, we’ve focussed heavily on creating and managing content, digital marketing, and online PR over the past 12 months. Whether it’s for clients, or internal marketing, we’ve broken a lot of boundaries.
We’ve seen our client TCCP go viral with the ‘bonkers for conkers’ PR campaign, Parallax articles on Moz, Creative Review and The Drum, and much more.
We’ve also spent a lot of time planning and developing interactive infographics to help promote the clients that we work with.
Expose gets a facelift
This Easter saw our Expose CMS undergo one of its biggest changes since we originally introduced it. Whilst we loved Expose as it was, it needed completely rethinking and bringing up to date with the Parallax branding. We developed a completely new UI, with a new toolbar, new editing features, and improved image, video, and SEO options.
This is just the beginning for Expose. We love it, our clients love it, and we can’t wait to unveil the rest. Learn more about the updates to Expose here.
Say Hello to vtop
Our very own James Hall has been at it again. Not content with the success of developing Expose and jsPDF, as well as the day-to-day running of a digital agency, the exciting vtop was released in June.
Command-line tools such as “top” can make it difficult to see your CPU usage across multi-process applications (e.g. Apache and Chrome), spikes over time, as well as memory usage. This is where vtop comes in very handy. vtop is a free, open source activity monitor for the command-line that helps to make this a lot clearer. Written in node.js, it can be easily extended and much more.
Continuing to share our knowledge
Several members of the team have been sharing their knowledge at conferences and developer talks throughout the past year.
James kicked it all off with a talk at our friends Hey!Stac, a monthly developer meet up in Leeds, to discuss cryptography. Following that, Andy spoke at Forefront Leeds, another Leeds-based developer meet up, to discuss development in general and how it works at Parallax.
James and Lawrence then spoke at London’s Internet World in June about the insecurities of wireless networks. Amazing stuff!
The Future
What a year it’s been! Don’t think we’re stopping there though. We’re currently working on some of our most exciting and ambitious projects to date. As well as that, we’re running our first AWS user group later this month. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.
Are you looking to work with a new digital agency? We’d love to help you out. Get in touch today!