Eight days at the Labs [27112007]

One of the items on our extremely well-populated todo list is to update our Portfolio page. It'll happen shortly, but meantime I thought I'd give you a quick look at three sites we've launched in the last eight days.

Several months in the making, the new Readings website gives this iconic Melbourne business the online stature it deserves. Integrating with their inventory and ordering systems, the site makes fascinating use of "product collections" to recreate the serendipity of browsing in-store. Added to that is a powerful and greatly simplified search, regular postings of events, news, product reviews and downloads, and a shopping basket that is secure, intuitive and remarkably fun.

We're rather proud of the Readings website, which we built from scratch in Rails.

BestQualityCrab is an unusual experiment in the convergence of blogging and geography. We constructed the site in Blueprint for a small cohort of Melbourne academics, who explain it like this:

It starts from the belief that blogs are usually created around time-centred ways of organising thoughts and narratives. BestQualityCrab starts from the idea that blog thinking and narratives can be organised in terms of space and place as well as time.

Blogs are rarely quite this interesting to explore. In fact, we think BQC might herald an entirely new category of weblogs.

Wired Consulting is a new Australian telecommunications consultancy with a remarkable pool of talent. This is our second collaboration with David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, and once again shows the flexibility of Blueprint.

Three big sites in a little over a week is not bad for a team of two inventors. Obviously our pace isn't always so quick, but since August we've launched 14 Blueprint sites of varying complexity. And you wonder why we love our little CMS so much.

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