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

We are looking to grow the digital marketing area of our business further so this represents a great opportunity for the right candidate to fast track their career.

So if you are an experienced, ‘switched on’ individual with good understanding of seo, social or ppc, 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 someone to join our digital marketing team based in Bristol, UK.

The role would touch on all aspects of digital marketing, particularly social media as well as having interaction with our design and development teams. You will follow detailed strategies with clear tasks and objectives and also be invited to input your own ideas. Supporting the Digital Marketing Manager, you will enjoy meeting clients to discuss progress and play a part in determining how things are implemented and ultimately be responsible for delivery.

The ideal candidate should be a good writer, hard working and organised. Attention to detail is important (are targets being met? When are reports due? Good spelling etc.). You should also be good at managing large workloads and task management (keeping those plates spinning), and also hungry (to learn, although we do have plenty of biscuits).

You should have a good understanding of digital marketing disciplines and how they work together as well as ideally having some experience in seo, ppc and social media (or be an all rounder)

A good communicator is vital!

We work on a wide range of projects but tend to focus on ecommerce and hospitality. We’ve got some really interesting projects on the horizon for the next 3-6 months too!

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 apply 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. Ambitious graduates welcome!

Salary: Negotiable. It really is negotiable. We don’t want to narrow the field by saying 17k or 20k or 25k. We really want to cast the net wide and find the right person and then pay them a salary to suit.

Interested?  Let us know about you in only 140 characters and send your CV to jobs@wiredmedia.co.uk

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

Even though the summer was a whitewash we managed to keep busy and have some fun whilst we were at it. We launched the Allsave mobile app on three platforms inclding IOS and Android, launched several mobile versions of websites and got the first user (Flying Flowers) live on the Hephalump api.

The new Big Tall Order website went live, a long time in the making. Although it is a great looking website its really stands above the crowd in its search engine freindliness, gaining page one listings for most search terms, and its user friendliness through the use of filter searches. It has a very comprehensive backend including stock control, automatic courier notification and full order management.

Bathroom Supastore is seeing doubling of its monthly orders and we won lots of new clients including Firework Nation, F1 Bathrooms, The Organic Hamper Co and Zuma foods.

We’ve also booked Jamie Oliver’s Italian for our Christmas shindig.

We have won several new contracts, coped well with Google’s Panda (or farmer) update and firmly moved into the mobile arena.

We have won new business for Ellenborough Park Hotel, Zuma Foods, Merlin Cinemas, Steve Blake, Signworld, Atkins and the Flags & Heraldry Committee. We have also been kept very busy by our existing clients including an API integration for Hephalump.com and a mobile app for Allsave. Oh and Wired turned 11 last month (so Happy Birthday to us).

With all of these lovely clients keeping us busy we have had to recruit more staff, so welcome to the team Steve and Andrew, you are going to be busy. We are always on the lookout for great talent so if you’ve got what it takes get in touch.

As a result of the recent Google changes one of our online retailers saw their conversion rate drop from 4% to 2%. We have spent a lot of time rewriting content and getting good quality inbound links as well as AB testing some key elements of the purchase path. It was very scary there for a while (for both us and the client) but we are pleased to report that the conversion rate has been steadily increasing as a result of our work and the average conversion rate over the past week has been a whopping 8% . . . now that IS impressive!

Hephalump, the online personalised greetings card service, were featured on Groupon (again) with their Father’s Day promotion. The server enhancements that created a more flexible and immediately scalable solution as a result of the Mother’s Day traffic proved invaluable as traffic and transaction levels rocketed. . . and we didn’t have to do an ‘over nighter’.

The new website for Ellenborough Park went live in May and they immediately saw a doubling in their conversion rate for online room bookings. They were mighty pleased. We are now looking at improving this further but cannot say much here as it is all a bit hush hush. Look out for the Q3 or Q4 update.

Finally WiredCMS 2012 version is nearly ready to roll. With improvements to the look and feel, speed, image/file storage, SEO/social, and better analytics integration we are sure this will keep us ahead of the game.

No repeat of the successful jolly to Cheltenham in March I’m afraid, but we do have an exciting outing planned for September and I think the team are taking me out for some drinks this coming Thursday . . . or is that me taking them out . . .

Where to start. We came back from the Christmas break (seems like so long ago) having to hit the ground running in order to deliver the Gifted of London website and make a start on the web design for Big Tall Order.

We have since won business for Ortho100, Bathroom Super Store, Broad Street Properties, Byron Bay Cookie Company, Team Pixie, 2000 Television and Artscrum. We’ve also had mountains of work from our current customers.

Hephalump, the online card personalisation service, were put onto Groupon (again) in the run up to Mothers Day and cleared an unprecedented number units over a weekend. As they had only expected to sell only 10% of this number (which was actually triple their normal daily average anyway) it meant we had to equip the web servers to handle an unprecedented amount of traffic with literally a days (and nights!) notice. We replaced the existing one server with five servers; a load balancer, 3 web servers and a database server. We are happy to say that all orders were fulfilled via the website in time for Mothers Day. More on this in a future post specifically talking about load balancing on the Cloud, the problems we encountered and how we overcame them.

Skin Nutrition were featured in the national press and sold 4,000 units of ‘Pure Potion Skin Salvation’ in one week. The servers handled the traffic with ease and there were no issues to report (other than a modification to their cms allowing them to bulk print orders – as they had so many).

Our Founder and Director, Tom, was invited to the House of Lords by Charles Ashburner of mrflag.com to celebrate the marking of the permanent flying of the Union Flag above the Place of Westminster and met some very interesting people as you’d expect. We are hoping to work closely with several government committees to develop their web and communications strategies in the near future. Watch this space!

A new website for ourselves – number 5 in 11 years. As a digital agency our work always seems to take a back seat to that of our clients so this took somewhat longer than expected, but we got there in the end. We are really pleased with the results and have had some great feedback and most importantly it has improved our search position and increased the number of enquiries, which with the current workload means we will be recruiting again very soon! Any decent web developers, with a couple of years agency experience, want a job? You’ll get free cookies from the Byron Bay Cookie Company, a Mac (or a PC if you really have to) and we’ll fuel you with free Guinness from time to time (see below).

Finally Cheltenham for St Patricks Day, which is becoming a bit of a tradition! A full day of fun in the sun and then back to Bristol for a bite to eat. Any ideas for our next away day? We were thinking of shooting clays . . .

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

It was great to see the demo of the Atlas/Cappuccino tools by 280North. They appear to be an excellent platform for building rich, interactive, browser based interfaces using standard technologies. Definitely looks like a leap in the right direction when it comes to bringing the tooling for front end web development up on to a par with what developers of desktop applications are used to. We are now itching for an excuse to use Atlas and/or Cappuccino!

A number of session by presenters such as Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame and Chris Abad of the twitter game Spy Master covered various non-technical aspects of launching a new website/application – how to decide on features, marketing etc. As a developer, the overwhelming take home from this was to keep your system simple. Work out what your core feature set is, and focus on improving it. Make changes, see how they change things – keep those that work, remove those that don’t. Don’t be tempted to add other features. Evidence shows that adding features generally won’t get you new users, but improving your core functionality will. A consequence of this is that you need to be measuring key performance indicators to inform these decisions, but also listen to your users (far too few people do this), they know what they want most of the time, and its frequently not what you think they want.

Aza Raskin of Mozilla gave a presentation on how we will browse and use the web in the future. Much of this focused around the ubiquity project a demo of which can be downloaded and used today. It adds an extra pane to firefox that gives a new way to interact with the web – type commands, tell it what you want to do, rather than clicking buttons.

The command line was where computing started, and is still widely used – we look after all of our servers by typing things into black boxes! But for the average user, things have moved on, you get a nice interface, buttons to click, menus and so forth. Mozilla have questioned whether this is the best way – there are only so many buttons and menus you can fit on your screen and have the browser (or other application) remain usable – try installing a few firefox extensions and you’ll get the idea. Mozilla are proposing, via ubiquity, that a command driven interface may better serve our needs on the web in the future. But don’t worry, its not something you need to be a geek to do, its different from the command line of old, it uses normal english. For example, in the presentation, some chinese text was selected in a web page, and the command “translate this” was entered – the text was translated to english automatically. If you are interested in seeing more, you can download ubiquity via the link above and can also see video demos.

As a final note, the Guardian covered some of the ways they are embracing new technologies and the social web to augment their print offering they are trying to put themselves in a good position as people move away from printed media – much of which is groundbreaking and should be supported. A great example is http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk – which is a web application that allows users to assist in the review of documents relating to MP’s expenses claims, a task which would be unapproachably huge if not done in a collaborative way like this – there are nearly half a million pages!

Wired Media have been appointed by the high end card retailer Thoughts Cards.

Thoughts Cards have ten retail shops throughout the UK and are looking to open more in the coming months. An online retail website will complement the traditional business.

Wired will wireframe the website and then provide a prototype for presentation to the business. Once the prototype is agreed Wired will provide the web design based on the prototype and adhering to company brand guidelines and then develop the website.

The website will be fully ecommerce enabled and also integrate with their current pdq, stock control and loyalty card systems.

If you are looking for web design in bristol, or anywhere in the UK, please contact us.

The focus of the discussion was that us designers and developers have a terrible habit of hiding away what we’re doing until ready to present a final product to the client; which invariably doesn’t suit their needs, a much more successful and proven approach being that of a user-centric design process, getting the client and their users involved in the development of websites and applications. By getting involved with the client and their business/organisation we provide ourselves with a means of better understanding the aims and objectives of the client and what they want to achieve from working with us.

But is that enough we ask? whilst understand the needs of a client and having them involved in the various stages of a design process is paramount; equally important is understand the needs of the users; the people who are going to be using the website or application. Usability studies have been proven to have a large impact on the success of a design process, by testing designs on a selection of real prospective users it allows for us to see where there are flaws in applications and test various solutions of them.

Paul also mentioned how he is frequently having issues with clients reducing designers to mere ‘pixel pushers’. The solution? to focus on problems, not solutions, rather than telling the designer you want a text colour changed or something moved, tell them what you want to achieve; be that giving the design more room to breathe or simply to increase attention to specific areas of a web page, they may have a better way to do it; and by telling the designer the solution rather than the problem it’s suppressing and wasting their creative capabilities.

If you are looking for web design in bristol visit our website – www.wiredmedia.co.uk