Just last week we launched an updated version of one of our client’s sites: http://www.ultreo.com/.

The launch was all about adding a few mechanisms for customer contact — a technical support form and a means of subscribing to a mailing list. We used progressive CSS to produce an intuitive, elegant and consistent cross-browser set of form controls. We also deployed a simplified captcha using a collection of words relevant to the client, as to ensure spam control didn’t get in the way of legitimate submissions.

Also worthy of note, the site was built on the Kohana framework. It is a lightning fast PHP development framework that helps us code faster and spend more time focusing on the stuff that matters. We’ve already started development on a number of libraries and plugins to assist Kohana development that we plan to make available for public use. Stay tuned for more on this in the future.

Washington state loves its wine (who doesn’t), and with the local wine industry enjoying continued, rapid growth it’s important that the Washington Wine Commission website keeps up with the needs of the expanding collection of state wineries, vineyards, and other wine-related businesses. Thats why we recently launched a new version of http://www.washingtonwine.org, which includes a powerful new set of tools focused on providing a more streamlined approach to managing contacts and their relation to the vast collection of WA state wineries and vineyards.

The new industry section provides a series of intuitive interfaces for adding individual business profiles and contacts, and more importantly for relating these businesses to the individuals that own and operate them. The resulting complex web of relationships provides a vital source of data for the Washington Wine Commission itself, as to help them continue to expand the services they provide to the WA state wine industry. The new industry section also provides a central mechanism for individual wine-related businesses to manage their growing collection of contacts and their presence on the Washington Wine Commission website — where consumers can browse local wineries and vineyards using an interactive map, search for local wines by vintage and variety, and much more.

In addition to the new industry section, we’ve also refreshed the Restaurant Awards sub-site with an updated design. The color palette was refreshed to conform with the featured glass work of noted artist Jesse Kelly. We also reflowed the submission form to introduce a multi-step, more intuitive process — including a killer jQuery file upload control that makes uploading logos and supporting materials a breeze. Definitely take a look.

Our team also worked behind the scenes on this release to introduce a series of performance improvements as to handle the steady increase in traffic. Our UI team worked to reduce the CSS and javascript required for the site’s presentation — resulting in 84% less CSS and javascript in total. This makes a pretty big difference and is particularly impressive when you consider that the new toolset involved the introduction of new, rich interfaces which required expansion of the site’s styles! Our database team also worked to improve performance by refining the data model for industry entities, helping to reduce query times which drastically affect the site’s performance.

We’re extremely happy with this release. Check out the site today — we’d love to hear what you think.

Raphael is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.

Check it out

I wonder if anyone believed Steve Ballmer when he told USA Today, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

This just goes to show that users will always buy products and services that are well designed, particularly if they make you say “Holy Crap!” because the experience is so off-the-charts cool.

Lastly, it’s not a hosted application. Like Inman’s very successful analytics tool Mint, this is a PHP/MySQL application that needs to be installed on a web server. Inman’s audience seems narrow: developers or very web savvy users who are willing to use non-microsoft tools and want a fantastic user experience. Narrow is good.

Check it out www.feedafever.com

This Web site, for the burgeoning wine industry of Washington state, has it all: good maps, drool-worthy photographs and plenty of information about the wineries, even including current weather conditions.

Read the whole article here.

This site was designed and produced, and is currently hosted and maintained by PLY. Look for an updated Explore section coming in mid-June.

There are a couple question marks for me though. One, it looks a lot like Outlook in it’s general appearance. I’ll admit, I’ve never used Outlook, so I can’t say from experience if the interface works or not. But I’m surprised Google didn’t take the opportunity to move away from the Outlook paradigm. Secondly I question it’s complexity. Google has always created conceptually simple tools, and Wave is very complex. Let’s all hope this isn’t the beginning of over-designed, over-thought Google tools.I’ll be first in line to check it out when it hits the street, with fingers crossed that it’s easier than it looks.

wave.google.com

http://motionographer.com

Prepare to be wowed.