Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Matrix are hiring!

An opportunity has arisen for an experienced web developer to join our team.

This is an opportunity for an experienced developer, and no recruitment agencies please :)

Details for the job opportunity can be found here.

Spring has sprung

Spring has arrived, and with it a couple of updated websites for clients have sprung from the studio.

The Isle of Wight Walking Festival has had an overhaul, with a shiny new responsive build, ready for the upcoming festival, the UK's leading walking festival.

www.isleofwightwalkingfestival.co.uk

The Island's leading luxury hotel, The Royal, also has a new responsive website that the team have been working on over the winter.

www.royalhoteliow.co.uk

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Ho Ho Ho!

The festive season has arrived in the Matrix office!!

As usual at this time of year, the team are all very busy.  No gentle run up to the Christmas break, but we wouldn't have it any other way :)

However, we always find time to conduct the annual Mince Pie Review.

If you want to join in with the festive fun, come on over to the Facebook page and have your say!

https://www.facebook.com/MincePieReview

Friday, June 27, 2014

Adventures in Work Experience

Matrix has been a real seat of learning this week.  Our new programmer Jamie is learning at an impressive rate, and Andrew our apprentice is approaching the completion of his qualifications ahead of schedule.

This week we were joined by Luke who was on his work experience placement from Christ the King College.  He has had a busy week, and learned lots.

We started out with the goal of Luke building a website.  He is very interested in the Isle of Wight Festival, and he came up with the idea of building a website for the iconic 1970 festival.

Day 1 Luke spent sketching design ideas and wireframing the site
Day 2 was spent putting the designs together in Photoshop
Day 3 Luke spent the morning working his way through some HTML tutorials, and then was straight into the build
Day 4 was filled with lots of building
Day 5 should have been a stroll in the park just tidying up and testing, but we gave him some other work to do to help out!

You can check out the 1970 Festival website as built by Luke at http://www.matrixcreate.com/1970/

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Happy 25th Birthday WWW!

I heard a couple of people chatting on the radio this morning.  They seemed to be talking down the impact of the World Wide Web over the past 25 years, which I was kind of staggered by.

Fact of the matter is, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with an idea that has changed the world - forever.  It was his simple concept in March 1989, to use networks to publish information, and view it from other computers, using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The first pages were pretty basic, and appeared in slow motion, but here is a brief run down on what happened since then.

1993 - the Mosaic browser was released.

1995 saw the released of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera.

1995 - JavaScript came along.  It made webpages a whole lot more interesting!

1995-2000 - the Dot Com boom gathered pace, and businesses and investors realised the potential of the web.

1996 - Two Stanford students start a project to crawl the web, and formulate a PageRank for the pages they discovered.  In 1998 Google was founded.

A succession of social networking tools came along, including forums, sites like Friendster, LinkedIn and Myspace, until...

2004 - Facebook arrived.  It started at Harvard, spread quickly through universities in the US, and became universally available in 2006.

2007 - as if the momentum behind websites like Facebook was not strong enough, in 2007 Apple gave us the iPhone and the web really went mobile.

Today, the web is part of everyday life in much of the world.  Many businesses are dead in the water without success in Google, many peoples jobs exist only in the web, the web is an essential part of our children's education, we use the web as a delivery tool for much of our entertainment and it is where many communicate with friends, family, colleagues and customers.

The WWW in numbers:

There is in the region of 700 million websites

2.4 billion people world wide access the internet

There are around 1.3 billion Facebook users, and each day nearly half of them log in

In 2013, 73% of adults in Britain accessed the internet every day

72% of adults in Britain bought something on the internet in 2013

I don't know about you, but I think this world wide web thing could just take off.

Happy Birthday!

Friday, December 20, 2013

Farewell to a busy 2013

2013 was a very busy year at Matrix.

We utilised our property portal technology to deliver a new website Advertiser Property, for the Maidenhead Advertiser, which represents the properties of a wide range of estate agents in the area.

A highlight among the local websites we produced was a fresh new website for one of the Isle of Wight's favourite tourist attractions - The Isle of Wight Steam Railway.

The Isle of Wight Festival website got a new look, and we have been tackling maybe our most challenging project ever, both logistically and technically, for the Isle of Wight County Press, all will be revealed in 2014!

That's just a taste of the many many many things that we have tackled in the studio in another fun year :)

Friday, April 26, 2013

The Apprentice - you're hired!

Here at Matrix Towers we have been scouring the country for a young person to come and learn the trade, in the form of an Apprenticeship.

We are pleased to welcome Andrew to our team.  Andrew shows all the signs of being a web boffin of the future.  He joins the Matrix team in the next few days, and we are looking forward to working with him and helping him develop into a strong member of the Matrix team.

Welcome aboard!