ENOTIONS 2.0

After 6½ great years, enotions has restructured, reorganised and been relaunched. Don't get us wrong - we think it was great before but now we see a way to making it even better!

We've refined our process, we've kicked out the bits that didn't really work and incorporated new bits that we think will make a big difference.

A significant change has been to personnel. We've been recruiting the very best managers and consultants and we now have a truly great team line up.

Claire Whitefield, Sarah Whitefield and Louise Nicholls are all new to the team. Claire joins us as Creative Director and Sarah as an Account Manager on a number of our major accounts. Louise joins the team to head up the e-Marketing division.

Our latest recruit is Will de Souza, who joins our design team. Will is an award winning flash designer who recently worked with Adidas on http://www.adidas.com/y-3 Will has some great contemporary design work in his portfolio and will bring a truly dynamic edge to our work.

With the new staff on board combined with the experience we already had on the team, we feel we are in a better position than ever to give our clients the help they need to move into the digital age.

If you are interested in joining the enotions team, please get in touch.

In line with the company changes we have also had our site redesigned by Art Director Linnie Richardson. Linnie is a woman of many talents (shopping being at the top of the list) and has a flair for creating incredible designs. She has now worked her magic on our new site and we think it looks great.

Staff under the spotlight

Each month we will be probing a member of staff about a range of subjects - just because we are nosey! This month we are talking to Sebastian Grant our newly promoted Head of Development (well done Sebastian!). As you will see from some of his answers Sebastian is very modest (!) and a quite a thinker for a man of his age. He also knows he is about to have the busiest 3 months ever.

Age : 26

Based in : Salisbury, Wilts

Thoughts about the web : The web started out as a good idea. It was then filled up with rubbish. Then I came along and started the cleanup operation, one site at a time!

Watching at the moment : Dexter Season Three and the Hellraiser movies

Reading at the moment : "Blow Fly" by Patricia Cornwell, "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Hunt and Thomas and "Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche

Visiting this month : The depths of reality and beyond

Doing this month : Learning Adobe Flex and getting in the coffee for the three months coming up

Interesting fact about yourself : When I was five years old I was "helping out" in the garden and put a full size garden fork all the way through my right foot

Other interesting facts :
I learnt to type before I could write.
In primary school I was introduced to Prince Charles on a royal visit.
In my last year of primary school I taught all the teachers in the school how to use the computer systems donated by the Tesco Computers for Schools scheme; was filmed for Meridian news and sent to various seminars on primary school software.

Client News

Groovy Technology of the Month: CubicConverter

By Sebastian - Head of Development

Recently, we were contracted to display 360 degree virtual tours for a client's website, we were supplied with a bunch of images for various photographic studios and asked to turn them into interactive tours.

Once we'd located all the images and "stitched" them all together, it was time to compile them into something that the user could navigate by dragging the walls around, up and down. After a swift google, we stumbled across CubicConverter which promised to export QuickTime VR movies at a fraction of the cost.

Normally I would not touch such software, the old Chinese Proverb: "He who pay peanut, get monkey" always seems to prove itself true - in this case I was very wrong! Three clicks is all it takes to convert a stitched panorama into a full 360 degree tour. The software exports as standard QuickTime VR so the results can easily be embedded into any website.

Check it out for yourself at www.clickheredesign.com.au/cubicconverter/

Client spot

Ongoing client relationships are important to us. It's a great feeling when a client comes back time after time because they are happy to deal with us and appreciate the quality of our work. We are going to be looking at one of these clients each month and this month we are looking at a business local to Salisbury, Lulus.

Lulus is a beautiful site and if you are a girl who likes to shop or a man who likes to keep his girl happy you will love this site. It's a full ecommerce site and a major stockist of Lulu Guinness, Rice, Kylie at Home, Cath Kidston, Greengate and Lexington among others. It is one of only a handful of stockists that have been allowed to sell some of the Cath Kidston range online. With a store already in Lymington and another opening in Fisherton Street, Salisbury on Thursday 23rd October 2008 business is booming for this girlie extravaganza.

We built the Lulus site back in 2006 and Jo Oliver the lucky enotions Account Manager that gets to work on this site has been working with them ever since. Jo's thoughts on working with this client, "Being that Lulu's is girlie shopping heaven, I'm always very at home working with Lucinda" – says it all really!

See for yourself what all the fuss is about at www.lulus.co.uk

How we work?

You might have realised this already but enotions is not like most companies. We are always trying to work as effectively and cleverly as possible to avoid passing on undue costs to clients. From the start we did away with a physical office and worked through a virtual one with the weirdos and geniuses who make up enotions, working from their own offices, bedrooms and cellars. That approach is still going strong with the majority of our 15+ strong workforce made up of remote workers. We are not all sitting in an office in a regimented way but instead we are based around the country letting our creative juices flow. In order to work effectively we have to have certain things in place that allow us all to know who’s where and what they are working on.

We have our own virtual network where we meet and work together everyday. We use Skype and Campfire to keep in touch, Highrise for client tracking, Harvest for time tracking and JIRA for project tracking. Every morning we log in to Co-op to say "Good Morning" to everyone and let them know what we are working on. Each time we are going to be away from our desk for a period of time we pop back to Campfire and let people know. It's also a great way of getting everyone's attention so if you are looking for an opinion on something, want to let everyone know that something is going on or that we have a new site live then Campfire is the tool to use. We have a number of different "rooms" set up so there can be various discussions going on in different rooms at any one time.

Skype can be used for instant messaging, calls and conferences. It also allows us to see who's online once they are logged in. You can be in a number of different conversations at the same time with various people and can have lots of people on each conversation. It's like having a meeting online but you don't need anyone to take notes and it's all written down and kept in the chat "history" for you. A great tool and keeps us all in touch all day long.

We'll talk about Harvest, Highrise and JIRA at a later date, but they are equally important.

So as you can see, even though we work remotely we are as "in the loop" as if we were sitting in an office together. Working from home is not for everyone. You need to be a certain sort of person to thrive in such an environment, but we all do. We all love it! If you like going to lunch with your colleagues then that can pose a problem but there are the obvious benefits such as the shortest commute ever and the fact that you don't have to look presentable for work! Having peace and quiet in which to concentrate in is invaluable and should you fancy spending 5 minutes on idle gossip there's always Skype! We are not complete loners though and the regular enotions "get togethers" ensure that we get out into the world once in a while. Maybe, and most importantly, enotions can call itself one of the greenest businesses around. No clogging up the road and rail network for our team! One day, ALL business will work this way.

Let us know what you think or if you would like to see a particular topic covered in future month's. Click here if you have any feedback for us. Hope to see you same time next month!

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