OurBlog

Indaba picks up Top 10 Magento Solutions Partner Award at Imagine Ecommerce Conference in Las Vegas

Las Vegas was the host city for the annual Imagine Conference for Magento and the X.commerce team for 2012. It was hailed as a sell-out conference, but when the Indaba crew touched down last week, we felt it should have been called a sell-out show, all four days of it. The glitz, the glamour, the food, the drink (oh, I should mention the incredible keynote presentations and breakout sessions too)... all top notch and never in short supply. Magento outdid themselves this year.

It is said that “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”.... well, that may be true of most of the antics you may get up to in this city where sleeping is optional. What did not stay in Vegas was the gleaming award presented to Indaba for achieving Top 10 Magento Partner status for the fastest emerging solution partner. We’re tremendously honored and grateful to have won this accolade and we feel it is testament to the Indaba Way; pride in our work, open communication, an unquenchable thirst for all things ecommerce, and a culture that cuts the b.s. to keep things real.

Of course, without the support of the Magento ecosystem and the amazing people there, our business (and our customers’ businesses) would look very different today and in the future, so when we raise a toast to our massive achievement, we tip our hats to Roy Rubin and his team.

So, instead of playing a game of roulette when choosing a Magento Partner, choose one that’s been acknowledged by the fastest growing ecommerce platform on the planet. Choose Indaba.

Extreme Loyalty360 Makeover

Loyalty isn't just a word, it's a business and it's called Loyalty360.  Our relationship with Loyalty360 goes back to the early days of Indaba, shortly after opening our doors. We inherited a website that needed several new features that quite frankly, other agencies just couldn't tackle. As experts in the ExpressionEngine CMS platform, we were confident we could take on the task. Upon completion of the project, both parties realized that while the features were rich, the content was a mess. With so many enhancements over time, the old site became pieced together and quite cumbersome to navigate. It was time for an extreme content makeover.

Say Hello to Stephanie

A Colorado newbie, Stephanie moved to the Centennial State last summer after somehow surviving 8 years of horrendous humidity in Florida. She's no stranger to CO's awesomeness, though - she grew up in Oklahoma (BOOMER!) and spent summers here, as well as trips to ski the Rockies.

Indaba's only female, Stephanie holds her own, and more importantly, holds us guys together. During the day she can be found working on clients from big names to small brands. She brings with her a ton of experience from brands like FoodNetwork, PricePfister, Wente Vineyards and SeaWorld Parks in online and interactive, social media and print mediums. Oh, and did we mention she won a "Best in Beverage" IMA award for her Tamas Estates website this past year? But enough of the name dropping; at the end of the day she really just wants to create usable, brilliant designs for both clients and their customers.

Matt Joins the Indaba Dev Team!

They say everything is bigger in Texas, and that's certainly true when talking about Texas native Matt's excitement and passion for building websites. Who's Matt? Oh, he's another one of our super-talented Magento and ExpressionEngine developers. Matt joined Indaba this fall after picking up his roots in Texas, backpacking through Florida and the Appalachians with his girlfriend, and ultimately planting himself down in glorious Colorado.

Originally a Visual Design and Audio Production major, Matt eventually found himself on the coding end of interactive and hasn't looked back since. That's not to say he hasn't completely given up the audio part - he's an avid fan of music and a musician himself. Music that influences him and his work? Rock & roll, blues, jazz - all of it. And in between building websites and playing guitar, he can be found enjoying a run, cycling on his hip 80s Schwin, or hiking the awe-inspiring Rockies. And when he's done with all that? Well, he reads, of course. Huxley, Vonnegut or Kerouac can be found chillin' on his bookshelves.

Indaba Group Expanding! (well, kinda….)

Indaba is delighted to announce the latest addition to their tribe...

Junior (and we mean JUNIOR) designer and developer joined us last weekend in the wee hours. Our chief and co-founder, Ryan is the proud new father of a baby boy who is already displaying an aptitude for all things Indaba. While his.... erm, "output" right now is not exactly going to win us a Webbie, he's showing a great deal of promise at just 5 days old.

Biggest achievement this week: He's wearing pants.

On another note, Indaba continues to grow with more seasoned designers and developers joining our ranks to assist with the incoming load of projects from great clients.

Happy Memorial Day from Indaba Group

While our doors are closed on this day of rememberance, our thoughts are with those who have served our great nation.

We hope everyone is enjoying the long weekend and wearing lots of sunscreen.

Cheers,

The Indaba Tribe

Good Ingredients, Good Recipe, ??? Chef

Prepare yourself for cooking analogies throughout; peppered with humor (see it's already started)...

What makes a good web agency is a lot like what makes a good meal:

Step 1: Establish tastes of your customer; "medium rare?" (What are your clients goals for the project? Tell them that everything is cooked from scratch and therefore takes a little longer to serve, but it's well worth the wait) - Indaba CHECK

Indaba Mobile

Hey All, we're proud to announce the launch of our new mobile site m.indabagroup.com.  Before beginning the project, we outlined three major objectives that the mobile site must address: convey the same brand and culture as our main website, load fast, and have native-like mobile interface.  As with every project we begin, we throughly analyzed our analytics which blatenly told us mobile visitors were either trying to find our phone number or get direction to our office.

Bootstrapping the ED Imageresizer

Here at Indaba Group we begin each ExpressionEngine project using our standardized EE Dev Kit consisting of our own mashup based on NSM Config Bootstrap, Erskine Design' Config and Ryan's Git presentation to create a fast deploying, multi-enviornment site.  As we try to keep the number of unique files that we need to edit to a minimum every once in a while we run across a plugin like ED Imageresizer that we can't live without yet requires some attention for each new install.  We went to the drawing board and adapted the plugin to fit our model.