Moxy Productions Inc.

…if we do say so ourselves.! This redesign for Bilingual Recruiters Inc. has been a pleasure from start to finish.

More than just bringing a contemporary look-and-feel on top of standards-savvy xhtml, we created some templates so the staff at Bilingual Recruiters Inc. can update the site themselves.

There’s a little AJAX sprinkled here and there, and be sure to checkout the table sort options on the Career Opportunities page, available simply by clicking on the headers. These are thanks to some brilliant javascript by the good folks kryogenix.org. There’s quite a number of cool little touches throughout the site–and as usual, it’s a bag of semantic goodness.

Again, here was a client that provided timely content, great design guidance and was a pleasure to work with. Maybe that’s why the site ended up looking so good!

We’re pretty lucky to have some great clients around here, but this relaunch is for one of our originals. Maurine first worked with us when we built a CMS for People First, an Organizational Development consulting firm in Toronto.

As she expanded her horizons into Business Relationship consulting, she was kind enough to bring us along.

And appropriately so – our business relationship with Maurine’s company is one of the best that we have…

Congratulations, Maurine, on the relaunch of maurine.ca!

We have a new client who is a friend of a friend. We’ve been going through the Requirement Gathering phase of their site, and have discussed with them our commitment to Web Standards, and our belief that it’s best to start with content and build from there. We’ve basically focussed on the best practices that we’ve learned from reading the advice of everyone from Zeldman to Cederholm to Clarke, to mention but a few.

This client recently sent us a document that they had received from an SEO firm. It was basically a checklist of points about building a site that was Search Engine Friendly, a sort of compendium of advice about on-site SEO. I shuddered while I waited for my mac’s Preview app to open the doc–I’ve seen more than a few SEO’s that used a lot of mumbo jumbo to scare clients into working with them–but I was pleasantly surprised:

Not only was the list pretty much on-the-money, but we do virtually everything it listed as part of a standard build of any static site. No wonder our clients see a Search Engine bump after we redesign for them.

Got the new design roughed in very quickly – only to discover yet another Internet Explorer bug. For you non-programming types, these little bugs are a collection of things that make IE (albeit the most popular browser in the world) behave strangely when it reads perfectly formed code. The reasons for this are long and boring, but suffice it to say that to make a web site that stands a better chance of working in virtualy every other type of output device (phones, tv’s, real browsers, visual-assist screen readers for the disabled – you name it) it is best to adhere to Web Standards. But IE tends to choke on them because Microsoft wanted to create a number of it’s own unique and special bells-and-whistles. Or for some other reason that I don’t know about.

So to make that broken browser work, we have to send it some special pieces of code that we call “hacks”. They make it behave like a real standards-compliant browser should. And just when you think you’ve learned all the hacks you’ll ever need, say hello to our new friend, hasLayout.

Fortunately hasLayout.net came to the rescue. And it’s fixed.

And we’ve just moved into a Rock Opera.

It may be only a few miles down the road, but it feels like light years away–MOXY has taken residence in it’s new digs in Clarkson!

Ominously located over the recently defunct Momentum Fitness, once venue for the short-lived The Rock fitness/climbing club, and originally a cold storage warehouse, the place comes complete with a Seizure Order on the door for whatever venture starts on the main and second floors. But up on the third, it’s another world.

The studio space above boasts a couple of design firms and technology companies, and notably a very cool company called Think that has been creating great print and marketing for a number of years here in South Mississauga. Owned and operated by Jeff Stephens, it’s a company with a lot in common with MOXY, as well as some key complementary differences. With some changes underway they were able to make room for us in their space, and this is where it gets great…

Getting to the office requires humping up three flights of concrete stairs but, as always, a bit of leg work pays off. Overlooking parkland and green space, the environment exudes creativity. The ceilings are high, the windows are huge and the view is nothing but acres of ball diamonds, soccer fields and trees. And then every so often, like a reminder of commerce to the day-dreaming designer, a commuter train wends it’s way through the tableau. It’s like something from a dream.

Recently, the building has sold. No one knows what’s going to happen next or how long this reverie will last. But we’ll basque in it while it does.

It also seemed to be an appropriate time to launch the redesign of MOXY. We call this Clarkson. Hope you like it.