Hello world - Part I

The virtual plumbers have fixed their leaky tap. After what seemed like was a millenium, the Newism site would like to say hi.

Why Part 1?

Simply because this is a soft launch of our new website, available to a lucky few including our friends, colleagues and family. We know it’s not 100% complete but it’s coming along nicely, and with a bit more polish it should be ready for general public consumption in the very near future. Until then, here’s the Newism story so far, where we currently stand, and an insight of what we are planning for the future.

The story so far

Wayde and I unofficially formed Newism a little over a year ago after doing time “working for the man” as employees (nationally and abroad), followed by a taste of the fast-paced action-packed life that is freelance web design and development. During the freelance phase of our careers we collaborated on many successful projects with a wide range of clients including ABC TV and Campaign Monitor.

It quickly became clear that by working full time as partners, we could provide far superior web design and development services than we could have done as individuals. I’ll spare you the long winded version and just say that armed with a business plan, an accountant and an ABN we kicked off our partnership.

The present

Since those early days, Newism has increased in size adding more services, employees and resources while still providing exceptional personal service. We offer professional web design and development, Flash design and development, search engine and website optimisation, email marketing and CMS customisation, just to name a few of our skills. Occasionally we even dabble in a touch of good ol’ fashioned print work.

The future

The future for Newism is bright and we have big plans for the series of tubes. They include:

First thing is to finish off this site, which also involves moving all of my custom ExpressionEngine extensions, modules and plugins to our new CMS customisation resource. We’ll also be open-sourcing and documenting our web development processes in our public wiki, which is just a small part of the way we plan to give back to the web design community.
Bits & Pixels (our local web design and development meet-up) will get a bit more attention and love, so if you’re a Newcastle web professional, or want to meet one, come and say hello at one of our meetings.
I’ll be presenting “Building a better website” at my first conference this weekend at Jupiters Casino (Brisbane) in front of 500 people. Should be a blast!
We also have a couple of exciting internal projects in early stages, so they should also keep us busy.

That about sums up Part 1 of my “Hello World” post and I’ll continue with Part 2 when we officially launch the site.

Get notified when we officially launch new site features (including our CMS customisation resource), create more useful ExpressionEngine addons and announce new Bits & Pixels meetups by subscribing to our RSS Feed, signing up to our newsletter or following Newism on Twitter.

Cheers,

Leevi.

Comments

The following 14 people were compelled to have their say. We encourage you to do the same.

Chad Crowell said on Thursday 11th September, 2:35am: 1

Leevi, I am LOVING this design and layout - beautiful colors, attractive text- I think you’ve got some sort of holy grail thing working here. Great job! I am really impressed.
Rob Morris said on Thursday 11th September, 2:53am: 2

Looking great guys
John Henry Donovan said on Thursday 11th September, 2:58am: 3

Very nice. The colours are very fresh. Congrats on your relaunch.
Michael Troy said on Thursday 11th September, 10:49am: 4

Geez, this is way fresh. Great work.
Anthony Short said on Thursday 11th September, 12:06pm: 5

Nice post Leevi, the future is bright for Newism! The site turned out amazing.
Seb Neerman said on Friday 12th September, 7:06pm: 6

Hurrah! Well done Leevi on squeezing this beautiful baby out!
Matt Stow said on Friday 12th September, 10:35pm: 7

Looking good guys. Even Opera for Wii is pretty happy :)
Andrew Strong said on Friday 12th September, 10:44pm: 8

love the design, beautiful work
Matt Stow said on Friday 12th September, 10:51pm: 9

But I think you need to change your smiley paths ;) Whoops! There’s another…
Wayde Christie said on Monday 15th September, 12:21pm: 10

Thanks for the feedback folks – much appreciated.

@Matt Stow: Thanks for the tip – all sorted now ;)
Scott Handsaker said on Monday 15th September, 12:38pm: 11

Really nice site guys….very impressed. Makes me want to re-work ours now…..must get back to that 18 month old project !
George Ornbo said on Monday 15th September, 4:44pm: 12

Wishing you the best of luck with Newism, not that you will need it as you clearly have the skills to pay the bills!
Lea said on Friday 19th September, 7:29am: 13

I’ve been under a rock! Leevi, this is gorgeous. Absolutely superb. The colours are soooo beautiful. I love how you got all the transparencies to play nice. Great job!
Leevi Graham said on Friday 19th September, 10:08am: 14

@lea: Thanks for the positive feedback. When you decide that IE6 doesn’t matter anymore the sky opens up and you can really go to town!