At the beginning this month, we bundled three of our Front-enders into a car with some sandwiches to take the long journey down to Brighton for Responsive Day Out.

Here is what Chris, Kyle and Joe had to say about their experiences by the sea. 

At JH, our Front-End team are firm believers in responsive design and we’ve previously worked with several clients in making their sites fully responsive. So a few months ago when we heard about Responsive Day Out – we’d already packed our suitcases in anticipation. We’re a pretty keen bunch in case you can’t tell

We wrote previously in January about a web app we were building for New Adventures in Web Design Conference. As Gold Sponsors of the conference, we had the opportunity to include a promotional item in the NAconf goody bag. We submitted JH Red 2b pencils for everyone to use – which went wonderfully with the Lane notebooks and Gridset Rulers which were included in there too (anyone would have thought we’d colluded on this!)

Image courtesy of Simon Cox

Continue Reading

To get 2013 off to a flying start, and as featured in one of our previous blog posts, JH are one of the sponsors at this year’s New Adventures in Web Design Conference.

So our PR and marketing lady decided to interview us for a blog post on what we’ve got up our sleeves for conference.

Chris and Kyle, NACONF is on the horizon and we want to know what JH is preparing for it?

K: Nottingham is a pretty epic place so we thought about creating an interactive map app so people new to the city can find interesting places around Nottingham a lot easier. Not to mention those who have been here before, there’s always something you’ve not seen in Nottingham.

Once in a while, an event comes along that JH cannot miss having a part in and when that event was born in Nottingham, not being part of it would just be ridiculous.

In November last year one of our designers myself and one our designers Chris took over a monthly web event in the city known as Second Wednesday. Since then, Chris and myself have put a lot of work into re-establishing the communication of the event to its attendees and ensuring we have speakers each month. It’s worked very well, and we’re now seeing good crowds again.

For us both this free event is a huge part of the Nottingham web and creative community. Chris found his feet as a web designer mixing with likeminded folk there while still a student and I found a great place to meet other business owners and talk shop. We don’t feel like this event should be exclusive or about us, more along the lines of ensuring everyone creative or in the web knows there’s a night each month they can attend to talk to likeminded individuals regardless of background or who they work for.

At JH we occasionally need to spread the word that we are expanding. As a result, we have three new job positions available in our awesome team.

As an agency, we highly value individuals who aren’t afraid to be themselves and constantly raise the bar in the process. We will instil your values in our work, and it will show in the end result. We’ll also spoil the heck of out you whilst doing so.

Each member of our team houses a passion about what they do and strives to find ways to better themselves and their work practices. For us, work is something to look forward to when waking up in the morning, and it shows in everything we produce.

On November 12^th, The JH team packed up their suitcases for a second time this year to take to our capital city. The reason why? As advocates of Magento, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to attend MagentoLive UK. Although not as sunny as Magento Developers Paradise, the conference had all the flavours we like to be just as awesome.

On the day before the conference, the JH team decided to make this event as epic as possible. Seven of us in total travelled down to London – 4 of our developers and 3 MagentoLive UK attendees.

The 4 developers we dragged along with us were to sit the Magento certification exam. After a tense hour or so with gritted teeth, we ended up being hugely proud of our dev team as all 4 passed with flying colours. For JH, this meant these team members will add to our existing portfolio of certified developers – further strengthening our links with Magento.

With any Magento project delivery there are steps that need to be taken to ensure quality throughout the build. Today I want to talk to you about the static development and how it ensures quality across our projects.

What is “Static Development”?

The static development is a browser representation of the projects visual design. It allows the design to be fully tested without the influence of the Magento development framework. The design is the focus and implementing it into the browser requires time, dedication and much consideration to see it completed with care.

We love this stage

At Jh the design team understands the importance and reasoning behind this step. We live by and trust it to help deliver an even greater experience. If your team doesn’t believe in the process they follow, you’ll have problems throughout.

In September myself and Ben got the chance to attend one of the best conferences of the year, and a conference we sponsored: Magento Developers Paradise. We flew out a few thousand miles for a bit of sun, sea, code and an epic amount of San Miguel.

Ibiza welcomed us with open arms at 3am the day before the conference and we instantly found ourselves homeless. Apparently the hotel wasn’t booked for us, and no-one knew of any impending conference about to take place the next day.

Not phased in the slightest we took our suitcases to the nearest set of bars and decided to wait patiently alongside a series of empty beer glasses. If Jamie asks, we have no idea how they got that way and none of this relates to the expense form.

Recently, we were faced with the task of redesigning and developing our own site – WeAreJH. This has been long over-due but due to client commitments, we’ve had to put off fully restructuring and styling the site. Unusually, we found this to be a blessing in disguise, as it has given us a substantial amount of time to consider the content, strategy and approach to the redesign.

We believe in and advocate responsive design, having developed several responsive sites, our design and development process is naturally geared towards a responsive workflow.

Examples of our responsive sites: