Web Species news

Announcing SellerScout

info@webspecies.co.uk (Web Species Ltd) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:05:00 BST

Today we are very excited to introduce our first product - SellerScout. It’s not quite ready to be released yet, but we are working hard to make this happen before the end of the summer.

We are a web development company and we work on various different projects four our clients, but when we see opportunities we invest our resources to building products ourselves. This is a first of hopefully much more to come.

SellerScout is a competitor price monitoring service for e-commerce stores, allowing getting real-time information about market prices, how they are changing and how one’s store compares to competitors’. The key sentence describing it is this:

"If you have been selling online long enough you will know that having the best price is the key to success."

Lately we have been talking about SellerScout with some of our clients and we received great interest, thus we are sharing it as a minimal website today. Basic information is quite well described in the website, but if you’d like to know more - please feel free to let us know. There are exciting features coming along and we sure hope it’s going to be very useful for our e-commerce clients.

Edinburgh Festival API launch

info@webspecies.co.uk (Web Species Ltd) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:43:00 BST

This summer we partnered with Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab to build an API for all events happening in the summer festival. The Edinburgh Festival is the largest cultural event in the world, so we are very excited to be part of this experience for Edinburgh residents and visitors. It went live publicly today and is being integrated into various apps, websites and data visualisations as you read this.

It was fun couple months building it and we are sharing more of this story in our blog here. From technology perspective it was an interesting challenge, because we needed to process, store and distribute data from various different sources all with different formats and requirements. In the end we built something we are very happy with and which works flawlessly.

As with all APIs it can’t be easily showcased, because it’s just an endpoint for other applications to get data from. It’s accessible at http://api.festivalslab.com/, but that is just a documentation page for the developers and a starting point of the API. We will update this news story once we get some application using the API, we know there will be a lot of them.

This is just a pilot year for this API and the plan is to make it even bigger, better and open next year; open data is an ever-growing movement and being part of it is a delightful experience. We can help you achieve this, speak to us!

We love web design!

info@webspecies.co.uk (Web Species Ltd) — Wed, 11 May 2011 15:43:00 BST

Even though we are not a design agency we still believe that web design is a crucial element for all websites. Content is very important, but first impression is always visual and good design is esential for success. That’s why we have spent a lot of time building our website and are very excited about the feedback we have received.

Last week our website was featured, blogged about and listed in dozens of web design blogs and galleries. For example these are just a few to mention:

One of the biggest websites gallery CSSMania
Russian design blog Naikom
Japan designer’s Motoshi Goto straightline bookmarks
French design blog Xbition-art
UK websites gallery designfridge
Lithuanian websites gallery BEST WEB
Very popular gallery MakeBetterWebsites
Another design gallery CSSDSGN

This is just to show that if we are going to have a project done for you in a future, we are going to make sure design is top notch also. Need a web project done?

Sharing the knowledge

info@webspecies.co.uk (Web Species Ltd) — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:13:00 BST

All the things we know, we want to share with the broad developers’ community. Introducing our blog for developers, designers and people interested in how web is being made today. Over the years in this business we have learned quite a few tricks, for example that PHP can scale or that it does actually work on Windows servers. Our goals are to blog regularly and keep talking about what’s next in web developers’ trends.

Furthermore, our blog is going to be completely free of business messages - we have this, news, section for this and we want to keep it like that. At the same time we don’t want to push our blog to non-technical people, like managers looking to contact us about potential work. Having a blog will allow us to have a place where we can talk about technologies to the right people.

One of the first things we are going to talk about is how we built our website, because we believe it’s quite an impressive showcase of new web technologies. HTML5 is at the base, but there are tiny interesting pieces like using History API to provide animated user experience, but at the same time have content for Google search in a clean structure. And this is just to start; we work on a lot of cool technologies on a daily basis and all of this, if possible, is going to be shared.

So make sure to follow our blog and let’s share what we know.

We are live

info@webspecies.co.uk (Web Species Ltd) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:00:00 BST

After months of preparation we are ready to go live!

We are going to be working on a lot of things as a company, for example we are just few months away of organizing our first training courses. For now please explore our newly created website and make sure to keep in touch.