One of igloo’s awesome developers, Charlie has been busy producing his band Brightly’s debut album, and here’s the first video clip!

..and while we’re keeping it in the family, here’s a track from another band at igloo (well.. MCM Entertainment Group), The Sand Pebbles.

let us know what you think!

Images can easily make up over 50% of a websites total payload ^{[citation needed]}, this is especially true on a media-rich site like Cricket Australia.  By decreasing the size of your images you can reduce pageload times, which itself is a significant factor in SEO optimisation (Google Ranking) and usability.

∴ Pageload time ∝ 1 / Website Awesomeness

 

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In this blog post we run through some of the settings for Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) and what they do.

A key feature to TDS is the ability to set up automated builds with continuous integration, making development and deployment more streamlined than the regular development process. Part of setting up your project for TDS is setting it up to build properly so that your Sitecore changes are automatically pushed to your target instance (dev, QA, staging or live server).

Throughout our experience with TDS, we ran into many issues with our settings and configurations. After lots of reading, testing, and asking a lot of questions to Hedgehog’s Customer Support (massive shout-out to Charlie for his help….you’re a legend!) , we finally have our builds automatically deploying to our continuous integration server.

Below is what we have found. If you have any questions, tips, or improvements on what is listed here, please post comments below. We’d love to hear how others are using it, and further our understanding of what can be done with this product.

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In this blog post we run through how we attack some of the issues we’ve had with the advanced usage of Team Development for Sitecore (TDS).

In Part 1 we talked about what TDS does, how to use it, and item ownership and deployment strategy. We will now go deeper to talk about the more complicated issues with deployment.

If you have any questions, tips, or improvements on what is listed here, please post comments below. We’d love to hear how others are using it, and further our understanding of what can be done with this product.

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In this blog post we take you through some of the basic concepts of Team Development for Sitecore (TDS), and it’s general usage.

This is an overview of how the developers at Igloo Digital are currently using TDS. We are still very new to it, and have much more to learn. If you have any questions, tips, or improvements on what is listed here, please post comments below. We’d love to hear how others are using it, and further our understanding of what can be done with this product.

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Happy New Years!

If you’re looking for a new challenge in 2012, Igloo is recruiting for two senior development roles to work with our fantastic team across a variety of large commercial and government clients.

Please email your questions and resumes to daniel@igloo.com.au. No recruiters please.

Lead .NET Developer

To lead and mentor the .NET development team.
This person will be a highly motivated and driven individual with fantastic interpersonal skills.

• Highly skilled C# & .NET Web developer
• Experience estimating and planning projects
• Experience with an enterprise CMS
• Excellent written and verbal English skills
• Cultural fit is of the utmost importance

• Agency experience preferred
• Sitecore experience a plus
• Experience in a mentoring or leadership role a plus

Technical Architect

To oversee the design and development of project architecture.
This person will be being responsible for the technical planning of projects, quality control and deployment. They will also be overseeing the development team to ensure the standards they put in place are followed through and provide assistance so the team can reach those standards.

• Highly skilled C# & .NET developer
• Experience with continuous integration
• Experience with build processes
• Experience with a variety of development languages
• Experience with an enterprise CMS
• Knowledge of design patterns and development principles
• Experience with Windows and Unix deployments
• Excellent written and verbal English skills
• Cultural fit is of the utmost importance

• Agency experience preferred
• Experience in a mentoring or leadership role a plus
• Project management experience a plus
• Sitecore experience a plus

To welcome in a new summer of Cricket and in time for the Boxing Day Test, Cricket Australia has this week launched its new website, cricket.com.au, designed and built by Igloo Digital.

The site features live scores, video highlights, blogs, the latest cricket news and team and player profiles. There has also been a real focus on delivering more video content and better integration with social media to make the site a one-stop-shop for cricket fans.

The new Cricket Australia website aggregates a huge variety of data sources from International, Domestic, Women’s Cricket and the new Big Bash Series and displays it in an accessible and easy to digest format.

The relaunched site is predicted to attract around 500,000 unique users a month during the summer cricket season, offering advertisers great exposure to sports fans within an engaging digital environment.

“We are very happy with the new site and think our fans will really enjoy the improved useability and functionality” said Mandi McPherson, Manager of Digital at Cricket Australia. “Igloo have been a great partner through this process and we look forward to an ongoing relationship with them”.

Igloo General Manager Jay Claringbold said “Partnering with such an iconic Australian Brand is a real honor. In the process we have leveraged our extensive Sitecore skills and design heritage to produce a website we’re really proud of. And the best part is cricket fans worldwide will be able to enjoy the site during the busy summer of cricket.”

The site is also supported by a mobile site.

The Take 40 iPhone app created in-house at igloo has been selected in the annual App Store Rewind 2011 featured content collection. Chosen by the App Store editorial team Take 40 repesents the best of 2011 in the entertainment category.

Look for the Take 40 iPhone app at itunes.com/AppStoreRewind.

Just like my man Tyree Cooper in the 1989 classic ‘Turn up the Bass‘, we are looking for some an awesome super dooper (Midweight) producer. Click here for the Midweight Producer Job Description but essentially a producer to help deliver great projects for clients like Mazda Australia, Cricket Australia, Cancer Council, Quit Victoria and Hardie Grant Publishing. To help you deliver these projects is a talented bunch of creative and technical eskimos. Sound like this is for you? Please email your send your cover letter and CV to Samara

Have you just finished your design degree? Wondering what to do with yourself? Wonder no more. Now is the time for you to be pedalling your wares. Knocking on doors, ringing on bells. Igloo is looking for digital design folios of recent grads to BLOW THEIR SOCKS OFF!

If you:

• Have recently graduated
• Have a passion for design and all things digital (print designers we love you, but sadly this blog post is not for you)
• Have a good understanding of web technologies
• Are Melbourne based
• You are bursting with ideas
• Are generally awesome

Please email a link to your folio here, we are eagerly awaiting the awesomeness! (PS tell your mates too…)