We offer a casual working environment but are of course highly professional. We have been building websites for nearly ten years and we are really good at it.

We are also growing and need more people!

So if you are an experienced, ‘switched on’ individual with good development and communication skills, a genuine interest in the web and are able to think for yourself then read on.

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Wired Media are looking for a developer with at least 2 years of commercial, ideally agency based, experience to join our team based in Bristol, UK.

The role would touch on all aspects of the design/development process from meeting clients to discuss specifications, designing systems and of course implementing them. As one of the more experienced members of the team, you would also be expected to spend time assisting other developers with problems, helping manage servers, taking the technical lead on others’ projects as well as actively developing your own.

We work on a wide range of projects – we look after several web-based business/management information systems, several totally bespoke websites/applications, a number of decent sized ecommerce sites based on our internal ecommerce system, and as with any digital agency, the usual helping of content managed websites. Additionally, we’ve got some really interesting projects on the horizon for the next 3-6 months too!

We develop primarily with PHP (5.3) and MySQL and host on Linux with Apache etc, on both dedicated and cloud-based servers.

We have significant projects developed with both the CakePHP and Symfony frameworks, with a preference at present for the latter, and have used a number of pieces of the Zend Framework as well. We’ve recently re-launched an ecommerce system on Magento ecommerce and are currently evaluating it for future use against the alternative of developing our own solution. We have our own in-house CMS system that we continue to use for most of our CMS driven work, but are considering moving to one of the open source systems over the next 12 months.

In addition to websites, we’ve recently worked on some mobile apps, on the iOS, Android and BlackBerry platforms.

Thats a bit about us – now some information about what we are looking for from you.

Candidates should have experience in:

Required Skills/Experience:

PHP 5. We may also consider candidates proficient with another scripting language provided there is some PHP5 knowledge.
At least one relational database, ideally MySQL.
Be competent working with and managing linux based servers.
Subversion, Git or a similar version control system.
XHTML/HTML/CSS
Javascript.

Candidates should also be educated to degree level or equivalent, ideally in a relevant field.

Good communication is vital! Candidates should be able to discuss technical issues in a simple and clear manner, be able to communicate with and understand clients wishes and be confident enough to ask questions and suggest alternatives where something is not possible or clearly wrong. They should pay attention to detail and take care in their work whilst being able to deliver projects efficiently.

Other Useful Skills

Experience with an MVC framework – ideally one of the ones we use! (CakePHP, Symfony)
Any other web programming languages.
Knowledge of other RDBMS’s
jQuery
Windows sysadmin.
Photoshop/Adobe Creative Suite

If you fit this description, you are excited by what we are up to, and you like the sound of working at Wired Media, please apply! Be sure to let us know what your aims and expectations are from work over the next 12-24 months

Interview process

Initially we will sift through CVs and then call candidates for a quick chat

We are really looking for the right person to join us and help us grow. Whilst commercial experience is vital if you don’t match all of the above but still want to do so then you are welcome and we will consider you. But please point out the bits you are not so good at so there are no surprises.

Salary: Negotiable. It really is negotiable. We don’t want to narrow the field by saying 25k or 30k or 35k. We really want to cast the net wide and find the right person and then pay them a salary to suit.

Interested?

Send your CV to jobs@wiredmedia.co.uk

HTML5

We decided it was time to embrace HTML5 for a full site build – and where better to do this than our own site! This new site uses many of the new HTML5 tags and features and takes advantage of HTML5 boilerplate and the modernizr javascript library to keep us backwards compatible with older browsers. This has been a surprisingly straightforward process and we’ve been pleased with the cleaner, more semantic HTML markup we’ve been able to use thanks to the new tags like header, footer, nav and article. We are looking forwards to seeing how the use of the new tags impacts our search engine ranking and starting to recommend and advise clients on the use of HTML 5 features in their projects.

Web Fonts

We’ve made use of several fonts from the fontslive.com library – we have dabbled with web fonts before, but this is the first time we’ve applied them throughout a site. Use of typography and a wider range of fonts is becoming common place on the web thanks to improving browser support and services such as typekit, fontdeck and fontslive (who help with licensing and browser compatability) – a trend we expect to continue, with typography becoming a key part of design for the web, just as it is in print.

On this site, we feel that the use of alternate type faces really complements the design and helps it stand out from the crowd.

CSS3

We’ve made a few subtle uses of some of the new CSS3 features – namely transitions, rounded corners and drop shadows. We’ve been careful to put these in places where they enhance the basic functionality, rather than being essential to it – a concept known as progressive enhancement. This means that those of you with newer browsers will notice these effects (can you spot them?), but their absence is a big deal if you don’t.

In some cases, we’ve also used javascript (with jQuery) to re-create missing CSS3 effects in older browsers as well, with the help of the easy feature detection provided by modernizr to know when this is required.

LESSCSS

A bit more techy this one, lesscss is one of a couple of solutions that allow developers to manage CSS files (cascading stylesheets, they control the look and feel of the text of your website) a bit more effectively by providing features such as code re-use, variables, inheritance and mixins. We are pleased with the outcome and feel that it’s easier and faster than using CSS alone – but are looking forwards to trying and comparing it with it’s main rival, SASS on another project soon!

WordPress 3.1

Most of the site uses our Wired CMS content management system, but this blog uses the latest and greatest version of wordpress – 3.1 (we regularly integrate Word Press with and use it alongside WiredCMS), which offers more features and flexibility than ever before – much of which we haven’t needed for the Wired Media site but are keen to use on future projects.

Enter HTML 5. HTML 5 is a collection of new features for HTML that aim to better cater for the needs of today’s web. For example, videos can be embedded directly into a page (currently youtube and the like use flash), and the new canvas tag will allow a range of graphical effects to be achieved much more easily than today. Changes such this will aid developers, as well as making the web more widely accessible – fewer plugins and third party applications will be needed. New tags allows us to more accurately describe content – new tags such has header, footer and article give more specificity to markup, which should allow search engines to better index content and assists alternative browsers (screen readers for example) as well.

A key issue with any new technologies is backwards computability. The whole world won’t suddenly download a new browser so that we can all use HTML5 on our websites. HTML 5 aims to offer backwards compatibility wherever possible, so we can start using it sooner rather than later and still have the site work in older browsers – a refreshing change from the normal way of things on the web.

Some of the components of HTML5 are already supported by latest browser versions, and others will follow shortly. If you want to find out more about HTML 5, its wikipedia article is a good staring point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5