Blog
Schoolbox Vision For The Future
Posted by
James Leckie on the 21st of December, 2011
Posted in Schoolbox | 1 Comment ›
In a recent pitch we were asked what is the vision for the future of Schoolbox. It was such an interesting question that we had to catalogue our thoughts. Our vision for Schoolbox is divided up in to 3 main areas; access, technology and learning experience.
Time To Relax, Get Festive And Wrap Up 2011
Posted by
Sean Richards on the 8th of December, 2011
Posted in News, Schoolbox | No Comments ›
With the end of 2011 nearing, looking back we can hardly believe the astounding success we have enjoyed and shared this year. We would like to share with you some of the events that have occurred for Alaress over the last twelve months that have made it seem such a successful year. In no particular order, below is a snap shop of some of the achievements we have achieved:
Schoolbox Goes Global – 2011 ASBA Conference New Zealand
- Posted by
Sean Richards on the 7th of September, 2011
Posted in News, Schoolbox | No Comments ›
This year Alaress exhibited at the 2011 Australian School Bursars Accociation, ASBA conference held in Auckland, New Zealand from the 17th to 20th July.
This was a big decision for Alaress having previously only exhibiting in Australian events within the education industry.
Leading up to the conference we had been working closely with our strategic technology partner Synergetic to strenghten both our ongoing relationship and the way in which we work together to improve our solutions for our clients through tighter integration of our two systems.
As part of both our organisation’s commitment to work more collaboratively toghether we decided to exhibit together at ASBA.
Continue reading this post ›
Symfony2 goes live
- Posted by
James Leckie on the 13th of August, 2011
Posted in News, Web Development | 1 Comment ›
At Alaress we have been using Symfony to develop our large scale applications for over 6 months now. We recently released Hotels.com.au based on the 1.4 framework. On July the 25th we were excited to note that Symfony 2.0 was released. This milestone is an important evolution in Symfony. We are particular excited by the introduction of Doctrine2 and Twig as primary functions.
A Big Step Forward – Alaress Wins Placement on Victorian Government Eservices Panel
Posted by
alaress on the 6th of July, 2011
Posted in News | 1 Comment ›
Alaress is over the moon to announce that we have successfully won a position on the Victorian Government's eServices Panel from the 1st July 2011 through to the 30th June 2014.
The appointment will enable our digital agency to provide a range of valuable services including digital strategy, web design and development, information and application architecture, maintenance and support and more.
A jQuery Plugin for Form File Inputs
Posted by
Tom Gordon on the 1st of June, 2011
Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments ›
While trawling through my google reader I stumbled across this post from the guys at Viget. I love their blog and some of the web development work coming out of there is inspiring and really innovative. The blog comes up with a solution to a problem I’ve always had with html forms; the way that browsers deal with file inputs so differently. This makes design difficult for designers trying to create a design that has a consistent look and feel to it. CSS is lacking in its ability to style these fields and the javascript solution that Trevor came up with is efficient and simple.
While the post from Viget deals with transforming a single file input in reality what a developer needs is a plugin, something that can allow any file input to be styled simply by giving it a class or ID. Essentially I wanted to turn the following slightly awkward solution;
$('.file-wrapper input[type=file]').bind('change focus click', VIGET.fileInputs);
into
$('input[type=file]').prettyFileInput();
IPN and PDT Paypal Responders Demystified
- Posted by
Tom Gordon on the 2nd of May, 2011
Posted in Internet Marketing, Web Development | 1 Comment ›
Building robust paypal integration into your site isn’t entirely straight forward. Here we use custom eCommerce solutions tailored specifically for our clients but sometimes the more basic solution is quicker albeit much less user-friendly. The basic integration of a paypal button is simple enough but if the client requires something heavier that can deal with writing to a database or the payment process? The IPN and PDT paypal setup can allow all of this and more through some careful tweaking of its default options and PHP scripts.
On top of the user’s feedback let’s assume that any order that has been completed needs to be added to your own personal database for record keeping and invoicing. This is where the paypal documentation gets a little bit hectic and difficult to decipher. The aim of this blog is to explain how to deal with this situation using a mix of two types of paypal auto-responder, IPN and PDT.
Alaress Wins Digital Business For Ormond College
- Posted by
alaress on the 29th of April, 2011
Posted in News | No Comments ›
In a national tendering battle between Alaress and up to three other highly profiled competitive digital agencies, Alaress is the winner. Melbourne University’s Ormond College selected Alaress as their new digital partner to design and develop a new cutting edge website as a key component of their digital strategy.
The largest residential college for The University of Melbourne and founded in 1881 by the Presbyterian Church with the hallmarks of open entry and liberal education, Ormond College aspires to be a leader in residential collegiate learning in Australia.
Alaress Wins “Best In Class” at Interactive Media Awards 2011
- Posted by
alaress on the 28th of April, 2011
Posted in News | 3 Comments ›
Our Melbourne based digital agency is excited to announce that our entry for the Mentone Grammar School Website (MG) into the Interactive Media Awards (IMA) competition under the category ‘Education’, has won the IMA Best in Class Award with an overall score of 486 out of a possible 500.
The judges also recommended the website for inclusion in the ‘School’ category (in addition to ‘Education’). This recommendation was made for reasons relating to quality and relevance and has been approved by IMC.
Why images appear blurry on mobile devices
Posted by
Christopher Cohen on the 19th of April, 2011
Posted in Mobile, Web Development | 1 Comment ›
You may have noticed when browsing the web on your new smartphone or other such small screen, that despite its otherwise gorgeous screen, images on websites often appear blurry. And there is a very simple reason why, which I hope to explain, as well as discuss some possible solutions.