UPDATE – THIS POSITION HAS NOW BEEN FILLED

To help continue the recent growth and success of Something Interesting, we are now on the hunt for a Marketing Assistant to join our team.

About the role

As a small and exciting agency, we have worked with some big names in the UK and this is an amazing opportunity for you to help shape and grow the way Something Interesting positions and markets itself going forward. It also offers you an opportunity to learn and develop yourself.

Throughout this role you will be involved in the following:

• Developing a marketing plan
• Working to set targets for leads & sales
• Managing our social media campaigns
• Writing blog posts & website content
• Establishing online & offline PR
• Organising sponsorship of events
• Working with outside agencies
• Managing a marketing budget

What we need

We are looking for someone who is self motivated and can set themselves targets. You will have a strong personality and know what you want and won’t be scared to contact other companies.

Based in our office in Southsea you will also be expected to visit existing and new clients – for which your own transport would be helpful.

Something Interesting will be happy to help train you and develop you going forwards.

Typical hours are 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, salary up to £18,000. Please apply to jobs@somethinginteresting.co.uk with your CV.

NO AGENCIES PLEASE

The last week has been absolutely fantastic for a couple of our key clients.

The Belle Isle

Started off in Southsea a few years back, The Belle Isle soon found it had hit the right spot with the discerning locals. Serving a range of world beers and an exciting menu all set in a chilled out environment, The Belle Isle is a great venue for a quick morning meeting, a laid back lunch or evening out. And now they have launched a brand new restaurant in Chichester – bigger than the Southsea restaurant.

We worked with Paul Taylor, a freelance graphic designer and illustrator based in Southsea who designed the website and continues to create lovely, simple and very effective artwork for them, both online & offline.

At Something Interesting, we couldn’t be happier to be with a client like The Belle Isle who continue to grown and expand even with the tough climate out there.

Belle Isle Chichester Sign

Belle Isle Website Homepage

Reserve a Table

ShipFinder

It was just before Christmas when we launched the ShipFinder website, a technically brilliant idea which tracks the movement of thousands of ships throughout the world. Each ship tracked shows a wide range of data – speed, destination, cargo etc. Not only can you see current data, but you can also view historical trips (using playback) and you even have the ability to “Sail Me” – which shows the path taken using Google Earth.

Working with pinkfroot we built a great website which handles an amazing amount of data every second to plot thousands of ships around the world.

The best part for techies like us, was seeing the ShipFinder website featured on BBC Click – for us this is a really fantastic achievement & we are really pleased that we got to work with pinkfoot on this and the PlaneFinder project.

ShipFinder Map View

ShipFinder Ship Detail

ShipFinder Image Gallery

So, all told, an amazing week for our clients which just makes us grin from ear to ear. And here’s to next week and what it may bring.

We are looking for new, interesting & exciting clients to work with, if you’ve got a project that needs some love and attention please get in touch.

We’ve been a bit busy recently with the launch of the AA website and working on a new iPhone app for a client, so we thought we do a quick post with some of the latest pictures from the office. Hope you enjoy.

If you’re interested in working with us, we’re looking for a PHP Developer to join the team.

About us.

Over the last 10 years, Something Interesting has built websites and apps for some of the biggest names in the UK. With a keen eye for userbility and interface design, we are progressively building our client base and reputation.

We are now looking for a talented and passionate designer to come on board and help grow on the great foundations we have built.

What we do.

We build websites, web apps and iOS / Mac apps both for our clients and also ourselves. Some of our clients include The Co-operative Financial Services and Planefinder.net amongst others. Our own apps include TrackRecord & DropIn.

We operate from a small, friendly office in Southsea, Portsmouth.

All the normal software is used and we are a completely Mac based office.

About you.

We need a designer with passion and proven ability, someone who can really push their beliefs and passions. And who will ensure that everything we put out, from full web apps to the smallest icons, is of the best possible quality.

You will also be able to work as the lead designer in a team of developers, you will need to be flexible but strong.

Key skills.

• Strong understanding of usability and UI/UX principles for web & mobile apps.
• Comfortable leading the design side of a project from brief to completion.
• Passion for great design and ability to push for excellent design standards in everything you produce.
• Some basic understanding of HTML, CSS etc would be useful.
• Experienced of working with developers to get the best results.

What we can offer you.

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting projects, some in-house, some client-based.
• Relaxed dress code.
• Occasional hack days and time allocated to your own projects or ideas.
• A competitive salary with bonuses

To apply for this role please send your CV and some examples of your previous work to us.

Photography students from Portsmouth University will be holding an exhibition of their work at the Round Tower in Old Portsmouth on 7th and 8th of December. Something Interesting is happy to be helping sponsor the event.

2nd year Photography students at the University of Portsmouth have been exploring the concept of ‘Territory’ and a group of us will be exhibiting our work at the historic Round Tower in Old Portsmouth.

As part of a 3 year Honours Degree course, this group of 10 students, calling themselves “10 Degrees South”, has come together from around Europe to show their wide-ranging interpretations of this exciting concept – from local landscapes to military campaigns, from nature reserves to wine bars to football supporters.

You can find out more on their website.

Portsmouth University Photography Exhibition

Since 2001 we have been designing and building websites for a wide range of clients including The Co-operative Financial Services, Planefinder.net and Coverbox. Working from a close-knit lively studio in Southsea (near Portsmouth), we take a highly collaborative approach to our work, with everyone getting involved throughout the whole research, design and build process.

Recently we have started taking on new, exciting projects and we now need a talented PHP developer to come along and get involved with our current and future clients.

What we need from you

• Previous commercial experience in website development.
• A pragmatic candidate capable of seeing a project from specification through to deployment. Someone who values code standards and takes pride in every aspect of development.
• You will be expected to have extensive knowledge of  PHP, MySQL and XML webservices. As well as being comfortable in the following front-end technologies:  XHTML, CSS, JS.
• We like personalities! You will be dealing with our clients from day one so we need someone who can eloquently explain their reasons for doing things.
• We use a lot of different technologies, all in a Mac based office. You will need to be able to throw your hand at different languages over time.

What we can offer you

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting projects, some in-house, some client-based.
• Relaxed dress code.
• Occasional hack days and time allocated to your own projects or ideas.

Application

Please send you CV through to us (previous work examples preferred) and tell us why you think you’d be perfect for the role.

We’ve had a busy six months, working on some very large and complex sites. Although this has been good, the team have all been working on different projects individually with little overlap.

The time had come for us to do something different and get our teeth in to a project we can all work on. So, today we started on our first ever hack day.

What is a hack day

In essence, a Hack Day is where a team of developers get together and all work on a project for one or two days. Ideally at the end you should have a working product.

Each of the developers within Something Interesting has their own section of the project to work on with everything (hopefully) coming together at the end of the day.

What are we working on?

Yesterday we did the setup work, buying a domain name, setting up hosting and SVN etc.

We also came up with the concept and discussed how it would work and any potential pitfalls. The concept is quite complex with a lot of unknowns which we will need to get past.

Right now we are working on the database set up, writing code to do the caching of responses and configuring the connection to the Last.fm API.

Update – 11:30

Logo Concept Agreed

After a few different variants we’ve come up with a concept for the logo which we are going to use.

This will be refined later in the day.

Update – 15:51

Just over an hour to go and its starting to look like this is going to be a bigger challenge that we first thought. So far we have:

Written scripts to create images on the fly.
Hooked in to the Last.fm API and retrieved and cached data successfully.
Built the database.
Created design for simple, functional homepage (below).
Coded up front end functionality.
Changed our minds on the logo concept we agreed on 3 hours ago.

Front end dev

Update – 17:30

Close, so very close, but not good enough to release just yet. We’ve got all the functionality working and most of the hard work done. Just couldn’t quite get it to a polished enough state to be released.

We have learnt some good lessons though, especially that swift and agile development is easy if everyone involved knows what they are doing and has an equal distribution of work. Ultimately on a project like this, you can only go as fast as the slowest wheel. And some of the parts of this project just took too much time to complete by one person and couldn’t be easily shared to another person.

If you run a web agency and haven’t tried this before I would recommend it. It teaches you a lot and gives you a great insight in to how the team work. It also gives your team something interesting to work on… which, lets face it, everyone needs sometimes.

We will send an update when we launch it on Twitter . Would love to know your thoughts and feedback.

Steve

We have just put up the latest two pieces of artwork for the office – hope you like it.

Thank you JP.

We’ve been busy prettifying our meeting area. Much better for our clients when they stop by for a cuppa and a chat.

Our pretty new meeting area

New additions include:

• Our supersized logo, printed and framed again by our friends at Southsea Gallery
• Wall graphics to frame the whole piece
• Vibrant new meeting chairs, no corporate reception chairs for us!

We hope you agree that it looks like a fun and inviting area for our clients both new and old.

At Something Interesting we love designing and building cool websites and apps.

Working from a close-knit lively studio in Southsea, Hampshire, we all get together and work on all projects together. Since launching our new app and taking on some lovely new accounts, we are now looking for a junior developer to join the team and get immersed in what we do.

What we need from you

• You may not have had ‘commercial experience’ that is not a problem. What we are looking for is a thirst and desire to build stuff you love.
• You need to be flexible, approachable, interesting, full of ideas but understand that a lot of time you will be dealing with a team.
• We like personalities! You will be dealing with our clients from day one so we need someone who can eloquently explain their reasons for doing things.
• We use a lot of different technologies, all in a Mac based office. You will need to be able to throw your hand at different languages over time.
• We need experience in the usual XHTML, CSS, LAMP (XML would be nice). We are a Mac based office.

What we can offer you

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting project, some in-house, some client based.
• Exposure to new a different technologies to keep you entertained.
• Relaxed dress code.

Interviews start 13th August

This is a great opportunity for someone who has little or no commercial experience but wants to get in to web and app development as a career. To get started please send your CV to jobs@somethinginteresting.co.uk