Rolled acquired by Juno Media

Posted by David Wiltshire on May, 20th 2008

I’m pleased to announce that as of the 1st of May, Rolled has been acquired by another local Nottingham web design and development company Juno Media. This acquisition means that we will be able to offer much more financial flexibility for social entrepreneurs that we work with, and help more start-up companies as they seek a web presence that they can be proud of when launching their company online.

Juno will also be implementing a lot of the way Rolled works in its day-to-day routine and management of projects. We will be bringing things like social web app integration, RSS feeds, blogs and open source to Juno as the company looks to expand its client offerings for the future.

All of Rolled’s clients, projects, sites and hosting will be moving over to Juno as part of the move and all outstanding proposals and quotes will be met by [...]

Client Launch: SHINE unConference

Posted by David Wiltshire on May, 17th 2008

Following our success with Eudemonic, Andres Roberts approached us to take on his newest venture in producing the web design for SHINE unConference. Shine unConference is a unConference for social entrepreneurs which took place between the 9th and 11th of May. With six hundred social entrepreneurs attending and a fantastically packed schedule it was an honour to do the site for this event.

The idea of the SHINE unConerence was to help social entrepreneurs with a variety of topics that they face ranging from getting grants to blogging. These sessions were held by partners and anyone who came forward with a good idea for holding one, user’s would then register on-line and then attend sessions on the day. Being completely unrestricted to one session and allowed to drop in and out of anything they wanted to.

Client Launch: global tolerance

Posted by David Wiltshire on May, 15th 2008

Today I’m pleased to announce that a client we’ve been working with for a while, global tolerance, has officially launched their new web design. They decided to use Tom Lane for the design direction of the website, and we took his final design into a WordPress system for the final result.

global tolerance are a values-driven communications agency that only works with values-driven clients. They’ve worked with clients such as Gandhi’s grandson, HH Dalai Lama, The Green Party and Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Foundation. Their services includes public relations & communications, communications training and public speaking.

Having worked with them for several months on this to hone their vision for the site into something their team feels passionately about and loves using, we have had our eyes opened to a mass of new cultures and interesting reads about their work and their clients. It has [...]

Client Launch: Pants to Poverty

Posted by David Wiltshire on March, 10th 2008

Pants to Poverty produces fair trade, organic and sweatshop-free pants that carry a message: man-made poverty is a scandal and together we can wipe it out. With recommendations from the Hub, Pants to Poverty asked Rolled to take the design produced by Ian Kerrigan and do what we do best: build solid, usable websites.

The Pants to Poverty Story is an interesting read, but in brief (from their Bad Pants Amnesty press release):
Established in 2005 by the youth group from Make Poverty History, this dynamic and exciting is a new type of campaigning social enterprise that makes luxurious yet inexpensive fairtrade, organic and sweatshop free underwear. Working directly with farmers and factory workers and only selling through ethical outlets (so no supermarkets etc!!!) Pants to Poverty is working with over 20 universities for FT fortnight and 40 shops and is now rolling out an exciting series of events, new [...]

Client launch: Eudemonic

Posted by David Wiltshire on March, 6th 2008

Eudemonic sought out to refresh their web presence, asking Rolled to step in and make this happen. Collaborating with Richard Ardagh of Elephant’s Graveyard, we worked together to get their new look up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Eudemonic had this to say about who they are and what they do:
Eudemonic is an agency for creative change, learning and communications. We work across organisational development, social & cultural projects, education and events. Our stand of artistic projects are about adding a bit of playful sparkle to everyday life. We are delighted that in less than a very short time we’re making an amazing difference to how organisations, communities and individuals grow.
However, their old site just didn’t do them justice:

Therefore, Richard put together a dark design using illustrations, solid heading fonts and [...]

Wanted: Front End Developer and Expression Engine contractor

Posted by David Wiltshire on February, 29th 2008

It’s that time again, we’re looking to expand even further with upcoming product launches and we require some new team members.

We’ll start with our requirements for each position, and then what we want you to send in and where as your application afterwards.

Front End Developer(s):

Write valid, standards compliant XHTML/CSS to a strict doctype.
Hand code crossbrowser, hack-free and valid CSS.
Show strong knowledge on Semantic XHTML structure and accesibility.
Be able to optimize images and XHTML/CSS code to keep it to a minimum size.
Take a PSD document and hand code it into a standards based XHTML/CSS site.
Ability to look at existing sites and suggest improvements in mark-up
Have it in you to do a fast turnaround if required
Have examples ready to show us and be prepared to code something of our choosing as a test.

Expression Engine contractor:

Show strong knowledge of Expression Engine with experience of use in [...]

Rolled visits FaceBook

Posted by David Wiltshire on January, 24th 2008

We discovered something dire today. If you searched for a local Midlands based businesses on Facebook you basically got very little besides the random company or two.

To help raise the number of real Midlands based companies with pages on FaceBook, we’ve created our own page at the URL below:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nottingham-United-Kingdom/Rolled-Limited/20804779240

Anyone can become a fan, and anyone is welcome to become one. We hope it lends towards pages being used more by Midlands based companies.

[...]

A new year, a new Rolled

Posted by David Wiltshire on January, 11th 2008

Happy new year readers, we’re back from our company wide holiday of two weeks over Christmas and New Year and we’re already rolling out some changes.

In terms of staff, Kieran Allen has left due to mutual consent and we’ve now brought Enrique Ramirez and David Myers in full-time. All front end development and web design needs will go through these two and they will start immediately. With Mike Robinson coming on board in December, this now makes four full-time employees including myself.

In addition to this we’ve been working with one of the few contractors we use outside of the team, David Pache, to re-brand Rolled At into Rolled Limited. We feel the new logo represents the quality we bring to our clients and we’ve re-launched our main site along side that vision. We will continue to [...]

Comparison of Streaming Video Services

Posted by David Wiltshire on December, 22nd 2007

Recently, a client asked Rolled to recommend some video streaming service after Brightcove closed its doors to public uploads. I, Mike Robinson, stepped up to the challenge and immediately began watching videos of people singing, doing magic tricks and animals in funny outfits. Hey, we all have to take a bullet for the team sometime, right? Read on for my findings on alternative video streaming services!

I have reviewed four services, and drawn up tables comparing their supported formats and features. Each was to at least have good video quality and be Adobe Flash based, ruling out Google’s YouTube and DivX offering Stage6, respectively. Use the table of contents below to quickly jump to each section.

Vimeo
Revver
Viddler
Veoh
Comparing The Services
Conclusion – Which is the best?

Vimeo

Vimeo comes from folks at Connected Ventures and is known as “Flickr for video”. Vimeo is simple and [...]

Mike Robinson officially joins the team

Posted by David Wiltshire on December, 17th 2007

Today Mike Robinson officially joins the Rolled Limited team as a Content Management System developer. Essentially this means he’ll be working with WordPress, Expression Engine, Drupal and the like to provide solutions for our clients. He’ll also be managing official Rolled built CMS based sites, including Sausage Roll, and making sure they are consistently up to scratch and updated.

His team member page describes him as so:
Mike is a Scotsman who hacks Content Management Systems, such as WordPress, Drupal and Expression Engine, into submission to get your site up and running. He is responsible for taking your web design and applying his knowledge of each platform to build a site with all the functionality you require. He’s also the resident tea boy as required..
He fought off several impressive people to get the full-time position and will be starting full-time in January after our yearly Christmas holiday [...]