about the company
Glossopteris Web Design & Development Pty Ltd. was formed in 2006 by James Nicol to service an expanding range of clients in all their web needs. The company is small at present but growing and already has an impressive range of local and international clients. The company has clients in a number of places in both Canada and the US, is the primary web developer for the Barcode of Life Initiative in Guelph, Ontario and has recently begun work with a group at the prestigious Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. The local client base is from a wide range of professionals from insurance to high-tech manufacturing.
The company details are;
Glossopteris Web Design & Development
7 National Street
Leichhardt NSW 2040
Australia
ACN: 120 104 074
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about us
james nicol company director, lead web developer/designer
James is the founder of Glossopteris Web Design & Development Pty Ltd., and prior to its formation, he was the lead web developer for the burgeoning Barcode of Life Initiative, situated at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. As the Initiatives web presence was not large prior to James coming aboard and because of the huge expansion in both personnel and data collection there was a great opportunity to create some innovative web applications to meet their needs (examples can be seen in the portfolio section).
An avid student of all things web, James is very well versed in all the emerging technologies, and has a willingness and desire to use them. Above all else though he really loves his job. The freedom and challenge posed by meeting the wide variety of customer needs is an ever changing and exciting prospect. He has yet to find a problem he hasnt been able to fix (or at the least workaround!) and likes to think that nothing is out of the question when it comes to building a website.
With a varied work history, from being an honours student in Geology at Sydney University, to being a development engineer in a high powered manufacturing company, or the data manager of the research office of a major Canadian university, James has an extremely broad experience base with which to help clients from any background.
about the site
Glossopteris.com is a custom site built on the excellent CodeIgniter PHP framework. Codeigniter is described by its creator, Rick Ellis, as;
"a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications"
As such it was the perfect tool to showcase Glossopteris and act as an informational resource for the company. It also allowed easy construction of a number of nice features for the site including;
- AJAX portofolio page: As an exploration of what can be done with the new AJAX techniques, we decided to employ some to showcase our expanding array of work. By clicking on the various links to jobs we have done, Javascript makes a callback to one of our PHP controller pages to extract information from the database and display to the page. This is all done without refreshing the page, and we added some professional flourishes from Scriptaculous to make the action look a little slicker. We have also made every effort to make sure that users with browser features turned off or unavailable can still access the content.
- AJAX weather ticker: This feature, grabbing information from Weather.com XML feeds, shows the current conditions in some of the places around the world that Glossopteris has business contacts. In order to comply to the Weather.com terms this information is cached in the site database (MySQL) and refreshed on a 30 min rotating schedule. Extracting the appropriate information from the XML data is done by a really neat library, DOMIT which is well worth looking at if you need to do some XML gymnastics.
- Simple Blog Tool: We decided to add a simple blog feature to the site aswell, just to keep a track of what was happening in the world of Glossopteris and if we uncovered any gems of web development or design that we just had to share with the world. So CI made this a pretty simple exercise using the MVC architecture and when time permits we will be adding to the features.
Another piece of coding bliss to mention, that has become standard on all Glossopteris sites, is the amazing Scriptaculous library, developed by Thomas Fuchs, a Viennese software architect and magician with Javascript. This library builds on the seminal Prototype, by Sam Stephenson, and allows developers to quickly and easily added a host of animation techniques that are cross browser compliant and add that extra little zing to the site. On Glossopteris for instance the fading navigation menu at the top is a good example, as is the rotating weather ticker, and sliding portfolio images. Prototype also makes AJAX calls just that little bit easier.