News

2013.04.03

A Warm Welcome

We are so excited to be adding another member to our team this week as we continue to grow! Lauren Baker is our new project manager and she's got a pretty impressive skill set she can call on as well. She attended college at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities and considers herself a Denver native these days, although she spent her childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Lauren, her husband, and pup moved to Denver almost four years ago and enjoy all the things we love about Colorado too, including skiing, attending local concerts, and exploring the local foodie scene! She has over 6 years of experience coordinating, managing and executing projects in branding, website design and technology. To that, we say welcome aboard and glad we found you!

2013.02.11

Voted Best Web Development Company in Denver

Thank you, Denver, for voting FIREANT STUDIO the Best Website Development Company. We are honored to be a part of the Aces 2012 winners.

Congratulations to Barnhart for being recognized in the Denver 50. We are happy to be their interactive partner on this project- what a success!

2013.01.23

Design for the Future: Responsive Design

Responsive Web Design continues to be a hot topic in 2013. Mashable just deemed 2013 the Year of Responsive Web Design. In order to better serve our clients (and their budgets) we here at FIREANT STUDIO have fully embraced responsive design and seamlessly integrated it into our process. From our project scopes to production workflow to our design process, we are happy to provide our clients with the latest techniques and tools to better serve their user base.

We feel the benefits of creating one code base which responds to all users' devices and screen resolutions, simplifies the development process and reduces the number of interactive offerings the client is required to support - no more mobile-specific sites!

In our first installment, we'll take a look at what exactly Responsive Web Design is and what makes it so valuable.  Here's the break down:

• Responsive design is a new and emerging technology being used for many popular sites.
 

• Responsive Web Design uses media queries to discover a device's resolution. This means the site will automatically become a mobile or iPad site without having to expend additional hours to redesign and redevelop for those devices.


• Responsive Web Design uses a fluid grid system with break points. A fluid grid means a column doesn't carry a fixed width; it scales to fill as much room as it can. Break points are arbitrary values that determine when a site should change the content layout to accommodate a specific screen size. Standard breakpoints are 480px, 768px, and 960px. If a browser is opened and expanded to full-size, you can utilize a layout to display content at the full 960 pixels. If you were to collapse your browser to 768 pixels wide, you'd see a markedly different design.


• Here's an excellent example of a responsive website we just finished developing - http://impossible.tv.  Go ahead and give it a spin.  Check this site out on any/all devices you have; open it in a desktop and play with the width of your browser window.  Notice how the layout "responds" to your device and viewing preferences.


• The responsive design allows the layout to adjust, or "respond," from three- to two- to one-column displays. Perfect for viewing the site across a variety of devices.

2012.11.12

Say Yes to Node.js

Node.js is a server-side JavaScript engine used to build highly scalable and responsive web applications. It's goal is to provide an easy way to build, scalable, and extremely fast web-based applications. Node is similar in design to, and influenced by, systems like Ruby's Event Machine or Python's Twisted.

This new technology is gaining significant traction among the industries biggest players such as:  EBay, Linkedin, Amazon, Twitter, and Microsoft. There are many reasons why developers and companies should embrace Node.js. Here are a few reasons why we like it:

• Node.js is completely open-source.


• Node.js enjoys a large and active community following.  This allows users to support and leverage this passionate community.


• Node.js allows for a single programming language to be used for programming both server-side and client-facing portions of an application.  Working in 1 language significantly reduces programming and debugging times as well as reduces the need to employ specific server side technology specialists.


• By nature, Node.js is an asynchronous environment. Therefore, it can quickly process many requests at one time, making it a perfect solution for large scale, high demand deployments, and real-time or collaborative applications.


• Node.js is fast,... really fast  - and what client doesn't like fast?! We've witnessed significant performance gains compared to similar deployments using Apache. Benchmarking Node.js


• It works well with NoSQL databases like mondoDB. - once again removing the staffing requirement and timelines to deploy solutions.


• Node.js is easily scalable, making full-use of multi-core or cloud-based servers.

2011.02.10

Helping San Diego Envision Its Future With Community Polling

FIREANT is working with the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) and regional transportation authorities to create online interactive community engagement and planning tools for the area's 2050 Regional Transportation Plan. By developing customized interactive learning and community polling tools, FIREANT is helping provide interactive community input that will help guide policymakers during their important  decision-making process. In an industry known for rapid change, it's nice to know that the effects of our work with SANDAG will live on to 2050 and beyond.