2011 has been a prosperous year for xDesign365, having increased our team from 4 to 7, relocated to larger premises, investment in new equipment and gaining many long term business relationships with new and old clients. We hope that 2011 was as great for you as it was for us!

We look forward to working with everyone again in 2012.

Holiday opening times:

We close on Thursday the 22nd of December until the 3rd of January 2012, during this period we will have emergency support available only.

Management staff will be on hand throughout the holiday period responding to emails and voicemails.

Development team will be on standby only for emergency support should it be required

Please use your usual contact methods to get in touch with us either directly to Euan or Martin or info@xdesign365.com voicemails will be picked up daily on 0131 339 3838.

We specialise in mobile applications with custom web based backend management systems and web design. We do not just focus on our customers work, we also love to give our staff time to work on their own projects, as well as our many side projects.

Specific days are set aside to work on personal and company projects, allowing you to showcase your creative flair. We credit the entire team who works on the projects; if the project is developed into a product each member of the team is issued with a stake in the ensuing company.

We are looking for a passionate and creative web designer to add to our growing team. You must be eager to learn and develop your skills as new technology becomes available. You would have creative control over our numerous projects and liaising with customers regarding their project.

All of our web design work is developed with a content management system – WordPress is our CMS of choice as it is versatile, frequent updates and has many thousands of people behind it.

This job may be ideal for a recent university graduate or someone looking to work outside the restraints of a heavily corporate environment; commercial experience not required.

Requirements:

HTML 5 / CSS3

jQuery

Fireworks (or Photoshop)

Advantageous:

Experience in developing websites based around WordPress

Oscommerce (or other e-commerce software)

AJAX

Version control

Bonus:

PHP / MySQL 5

Salary dependant on skill set and relevant experience. Please send portfolio and/or CV to recruitment@xdesign365.com

What the client asked for:

Saloca is going to revolutionise the way the way that you book the best hair, beauty, spa deals; providing instant online bookings.

What we did:

Whilst working on Saloca’s system we have created a landing page to build up a publicity the exciting revolutionary system. This has direct integration with mailchimp to record customers details ready for prelaunch marketing campaign.

As part of a cohesive prelaunch social media strategy, the site has deep integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Clowby is a crowd sourced peer to peer marketplace that we are currently developing for the Clowby team. The customer asked us to develop a landing page to build a buzz regarding the upcoming product.

What we did:

We created an attractive landing page to draw attention to some of the excellent features of Clowby. Clowby updates are displayed prominently under the Ramblings section with frequent updates from the Clowby team as well as a mailing list subscription to record interested parties contact details for future contact. We integrated Twitter and Facebook as the social networks of choice for more updates from the Clowby team.

What the client asked for:

The client was looking to build a website that will allow them display their upcoming development plans for the Craighouse Campus in Edinburgh. This involved displaying photographs of the proposed development site as well as additional downloads for visitors.

What we did:

We developed built the site from the ground up using a content management system; WordPress; this allowed us to give the customer full control of their website.

We designed the website to have a dynamic slideshow to display the attractive grounds in its full glory. With a sleek and clean design it allows the visitors to quickly navigate to find the content they are looking for.

With a public consultation website; keeping the visitors up to date with the latest news is important, as such as having a news page with date and time stamps ensure that the reader always gets the latest content. An RSS feed is also built in should people wish to subscribe for updates.

Search optimisation is always key for our clients so we ensured that the site was SEO friendly from the start.

What the client asked for:

Litterboss was looking to modernise their current business operations; they were previously using excel spread sheets and paper proof of delivery systems. This process used to take several hours of their time per day; heavily time consuming, huge amounts of paper wastage and reliance on out-dated techniques. One of the major issues faced by Litterboss was how to prove that their staff were on site when they said they were.

The project was put out for a competitive tender, with a multitude of blue-chip corporations tendering. Alternatives included a antiquated electronic pen system, overpriced custom PDAs. Our system was provided with no ongoing licensing fees, something that was going to run into tens of thousands of pounds a year for alternate system.

What we did:

We spent several days analysing Litterboss operations and came up with an excellent solution to modernisation of their operations. We decided to create a web based solution to manage all of the backend of the Litterboss system including a complex CRM system to hold all of client details and an Android application for digital capture of the required information .

We proceeded to create a three part complex web based management system; management area, contractor area, customer area to cater for all of Litterboss’s needs.

The management area analyses data from the Met Office to accurately predict which areas of the country will require service. This then notifies drivers of forthcoming work by SMS and e-mail and if no work is to be carried out it will alert them to no upcoming work. The system is a full CRM system allowing for all site details, pricing, customers, work to ensure that historical data is always available to Litterboss staff. The system creates invoice reports for the Litterboss team to produce invoices from. Management e-mail reports are sent at the end of the day to Litterboss management giving them information on completed sites and income generated.
The contractor area gives a full overview of all sites that the contractor has under his portfolio, full site details such as padlock codes, contact phone numbers and any Litterboss notifications.

The contractors can view historical pricing information for all of their completed visits to provide billing information. Emails are sent once work has been completed providing the contractors with invoicing information. The contractor can request the application to be resent to their Android tablets for download.

The customer area allows customers to view information on forthcoming visits to their sites, historical work reports on their sites and information behind their site.

The drivers on the ground have been we decided on affordable Android 7″ tablets which allows for signature capture via finger on the device. By using an Android tablet we were able to insert a 3G SIM card to give the tablets Internet access which allowed for data to be transmitted back to our central Litterboss management area as well as capturing the GPS location. These tablets are robust to handle the environment that they are being used in.

Furthermore, our system uses no proprietary technology. We used a finely-tuned LAMP stack on the server-side, taking advantage of the latest mySQL database server replication features to ensure the data is consistently backed up over over multiple geographically-distinct datacentres. As this project demands high availability at all times, we took this into account from day 0 of development. To date, there has been no downtime whatsoever.

We received several pieces of media coverage for the development of this exciting leap forward in snow clearance software, including both STV and The Scotsman Newspaper.

What the client asked for:

Fergusson coal was looking to improve the image of the coal industry by creating an iPhone application promoting the companies forward thinking in the coal industry. They wanted to make it easier for general public to be able to find out information on coal and the coal industry as well as locating the nearest depot to order/purchase coal.

What we did:

We began by first ensuring that the iPhone application would have a similar design to the website, this is to ensure that the brand is consistent throughout the company. It was decided that having an interactive map showing the location of all the depots throughout the United Kingdom is an excellent way for people to quickly find the nearest depot; providing the user with the address and telephone number. One of the main points that Fergusson Coal brought to us is that many people do not know what types of coal to use for different applications.

Keeping users up to date with the latest changes at Fergusson Coal was a great addition, in order to keep updating a minor task we have an RSS feed that brings the latest news straight from the Fergusson Coal website.

We also built a contact form that feeds straight into the Fergusson Coal customer service department to ensure that you are put directly in touch with the correct coal specialist.

What the client asked for:

What we did:

What the client asked for:

What we did:

What the client asked for:

What we did: