Carsonified

We’ve recently finalised the speaker list for our next event, Fuel Conference, and are privileged and excited to be welcoming the following folks to share their wisdom with us:

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I’d like to say a huuuuuuge welcome to Mike Kus, the newest member of the Carsonified Team! He’s joining us as our new Senior Designer.

We value design and quality very highly at Carsonified so it’s wonderful to have him on board. He moved his entire family to Bath to join us, so we’re really grateful to have him.

Mike is an amazingly talented web designer who has a good understanding of semantic markup whilst also having incredible visual creativity. Beautifully designed websites are of the utmost importance to us (of course :D) but we were also wowed by his extensive print design experience.

You can look forward to all the creativity that’ll be flying out of Carsonified HQ soon :)

A large chunk of our business comes from our events and we felt it was time to invest in the backend that runs the sites and bookings for Future of Web Apps, Fuel, Future of Web Design, Future of Mobile and Carson Workshops.

We currently have this barely-functional thing we call the ‘CMS’ which was built in a hurry and is basically a pain in the ass. Its worked pretty well up until now but we’re noticing that bugs are starting to appear and it lacks a ton of the functionality that we need.

The first step

The first thing we did was sit down and decide what we loved and hated about the current system. We had to be careful here because it would’ve been easy to get carried away with adding superfluous functionality (’It be great if it did ….’).

We basically came up with a very rough list of things the system should be able to do. Once we all agreed, Adam constructed a flow diagram of the booking process.

Our main goal was to make life easier for everyone when they’re booking tickets to our events. Therefore we started with the Booking Page. Adam did a very rough layout for this (we didn’t even bother to wireframe it).

The first obvious step was to break the booking process down into steps. Previously it was just one huge, long page and it was very unwieldy. By showing the person booking the seat that there were four basic steps to complete, it would give them an idea of where they were in the process and that it did indeed have an end :)

View full size image.

By the way, you may be wondering why Adam is working on the events backend when we hired him to work on DropSend. Well, the truth is that after he joined us, he realized that he left the company he started a little too soon, without giving it a chance to really take off. It was nothing to do with us, he just realized he should’ve given his own company more of a chance before leaving it. Of course we were surprised but he’s super talented so we decided to keep working with him. This was the perfect project to team up on. Anyway, back to the story …

The power of Rails

I’m an ex-PHP developer with a Computer Science degree, so I’ve never touched Ruby or Rails. Of course I’ve heard about how you can build apps much faster in Rails, but we’ve never actually used it at Carsonified.

Holy crap, I’m a believer.

We went from a visual of the booking page to a roughly functioning app in two days. TWO DAYS. Here are a few screencasts of the system in action.

Event Stream - Part I from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Wireframe to working app in seven calendar days

Just three days later, we had added the design skinning to the process and it was looking really great. We still have quite a few copy and design tweaks, but it’s basically there. Seven days - unbelievable. And keep in mind that’s calendar days not week days.

Carsonified’s new web app - Event Stream from Carsonified on Vimeo.

What’s its name?

We’ve decided to call this system ‘Event Stream’ and we’ve done a temporary logo for it.

Once we have more time, we’ll probably redo this logo, but for now, it’s great to have another Carsonified Web App.

Well, I’ve got a ton more to share with you about the system. We’re so excited about it!

I’d like to say a huge welcome to Adam Cooke, the latest person to join the Carsonified Team! He’s going to be our new DropSend Manager. In addition to being an amazing developer (PHP and Rails), he’s got a sharp mind for business. His job is to grow the revenue of the application and make our users happier.

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The entrepreneurial bug has bitten Elliot and he’s decided to brave the wild and start his own design firm. We’re so excited for him and we know he’ll kick ass :)

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It’s hard to believe but I am already nearing the end of my second week at Carsonified. I’ve been busy settling in, learning the ropes, getting to grips with the controls on the Aeron chair and helping organise this week’s Start-up clinic.

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We’re so excited to welcome three new people to the Carsonified Team (bringing us up to 11 full-time folks). I’d like to say a huge welcome to Will, Natasha and Keir!

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