Celebrating Two Years of The Pixel Parlour

Two years ago The Pixel Parlour was founded on the simple premise that there was a better way to create websites for start-ups and small businesses. We believed that technologies like Responsive design and research practices such as usability testing should be in reach of companies who don’t necessarily have five-figure website budgets.

To make this a reality we’ve had to think afresh about the processes behind creating truly effective websites and have shaped our own unique approach, embracing what is new and genuinely adds value for our clients and their customers and jettisoning anything that doesn’t.

Over the past 24 months we helped more than 20 businesses improve their web presence, launch new print & email marketing campaigns or completely re-brand. You can get a taste for some of that work in our design portfolio.

From all this work four core stands to our approach have emerged:

Collaborative working

No-one understands the needs of our clients’ businesses better then they do. That’s why we put a strong emphasis working collaboratively, forming a partnership of experts to really understand a project and plan the perfect solution, together.

User Experience Design

Known internally as ‘thoughtful design’ we’ve embedded UXD techniques such as wireframing, prototyping and usability testing in our process to help progressively shape a design, analysing and iterating in stages to create great user experiences that also deliver results for our clients.

Responsive design

The future of the web is undoubtedly mobile and Responsive design is our preferred approach for delivering online experiences that are tailored to the accessing device (Desktop PC, Tablet or Smartphone) but are unified in the content and functionality available to all users. Simply dumbing down for mobile or restricting desktop functionality simply don’t cut it any more. Look out for a responsive redesign of our own site in the near future…

WordPress

WordPress has become our platform of choice for offering complete development solutions and we love it. It’s open, hugely extensible and supported by a community of passionate developers, no wonder it’s also the CMS of choice for over 50% of the web at large.

Sharing is good

Isn’t sharing how you work like showing how the magic is done? Nope, for us it’s about helping our clients (and the wider web community) feel empowered to make better-informed decisions about online strategy and understand why we’re taking the direction we are with a project. This blog is a small part of that and we hope to be sharing a lot more in the coming months.

So Happy Birthday to us and thanks to all our wonderful clients who have joined us on the journey so far, we are genuinely excited about what lies ahead. And to help start our third year on a bit of a high one of our projects has been shortlisted in the 2013 Nominet Internet Awards, we’ll find out if it comes out top in July!