Gruden will be closing for business at the end of the trading day on Friday 23rd of December 2011 and will be re-opening with our normal trading hours on Tuesday the 3rd of January 2012.
Please make arrangements to contact your Account Manager, who can provide contact details in case of any critical issues during this period.
On behalf of all the team at Gruden, may we take this opportunity to thank you for your support and to wish you and your team a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.
Guzman y Gomez (GyG) is a fast growing franchise of Mexican food outlets that focuses on its core values of “Passion, Remarkable and Authentic”.
Starting in 2006 from humble beginnings in Newtown, NSW, by the time they came to Gruden they had grown to 8 stores and were urgently in need of a major website upgrade.
The previous site was based around Flash which limited the ability to add features and updates, and to engage with the site from mobile devices.
A new look and feel to the site was required along with a comprehensive online ordering mechanism, social links and the flexibility to add videos, competitions, new menu items, charity initiatives, loyalty programs and mobile applications. In short GyG needed a simple looking and easy to use site both for the user and the administrators that was capable of growing in parallel with its rapidly growing franchise.
Of primary importance was to provide for the sale of its product online but also very important to the proprietors was to provide information on store locations and openings, promote Mexican Food and Latin culture and gain some insight into GyGs people and passion.
After an initial scoping phase in which representatives from GyG and Gruden met to create user profiles and discuss ideas and functionality of the site it was decided to implement WordPress as a CMS as it allowed for plug-ins and additions to the site as requirements grew.
Conversely to this it was decided to minimise the use of Flash so as to avoid incompatibility issues with mobile and tablet devices.
Gruden then designed 5 base templates and content styles aimed at keeping the functionality simple, effective and easy to use.
From the creative side GyG supplied us with logos and artwork which we used as a starting guide to the overall look and feel of the site.
Contemporary. Clean. Urban. Street. Bold. Punchy. Colourful. Healthy. Mexican. Latin. Friendly. Happy. Social and Authentic. Just a few of the words used to convey the imagery of the site, and a slightly “off kilter” effect was devised to give the site a “hand crafted” look reflecting the values the owners saw in the preparation and presentation of their food.
Online sales have risen considerably; at busy times some stores have struggled to keep up with in store and online demand.
GyG administrators love that they are able to regularly cycle promos through the home page, post videos and receive visible, live social content and comments via twitter and other social channels.
The ordering and menu navigation is greatly improved for the user and the store location maps are clear, concise and easy to access.
The site upon first opening appears vibrant, full of fun, busy, healthy and happy; achieving everything the client had in mind.
The site refresh is just the first step. With a platform established, we’re working on extending the online ordering capability and moving into the mobile space. Keep an eye out!
Visit the site: Guzman y Gomez, Mexican Taqueria
Despite the terrible weather we achieved a fantastic turn out to our joint event with Adobe called “Insightful Customer Engagement” at The Hotel Intercontinental, Sydney.
It was exciting to have so many notable industry figures in the room taking an interest not only in Adobe technology but also in the concepts and strategies behind delivering Insightful Customer Engagement across multiple platforms and devices.
The event format proved to be a hit amongst the attendees. The presentations from leading industry figures were well received and the small group POD breakout sessions covering off the below subjects were well attended:
The web has shifted from being something on the fringe to a tool tightly woven into our daily lives. The uptake of mobile only makes this shift more prevalent. “Digital Native” or not, your customers interact with your web presence in some form and expect an engaging, friendly and consistent
experience.
Connecting people and technology to building lasting memorable experiences has never been more critical. To address the gap between human needs and technology Gruden has responded by developing the Customer Engagement Strategy Workshop.
Regardless of where you are in your technology lifecycle Gruden can help kick-start the next phase of your digital journey through an intensive interactive workshop conducted by our team of Customer Engagement Specialists. The Customer Engagement Strategy Workshop is designed to identify your key customer groups and will look at the ways in which your web presence currently meets user needs and will provide clarity around any gaps in current strategy.
If you are unsure of just how well your organisation engages with your customer we now encourage you to contact the CES team at Gruden to enquire about this vitally important and eminently useful workshop.
Additionally should you or your team feel the above POD topics are relevant to your organization we are prepared to bring these PODS into your organization and conduct a 90 minute session with a select group of your executive team.
View more details and register for a Customer Engagement Strategy Workshop. Or contact our team for more information or to arrange for a Pod demonstration to be conducted within your work place.
And remember - The Web is Mobile. The world is Social. The imperative is Experience.
As you may or may not know, every first Tuesday of November is Melbourne Cup Day. Billed as “the race that stops a nation”, who were we to disparage and dishonour this historical icon of Australiana?
Honour it we did. It would be un-Australian to see two flies crawling up a wall and not have a wager, so the sweepstake was on. Big spending was the order of the day and they were organised two categories: the $5 and the $10. The winners were Pauline for the $5 and Simon for the $10. As you may appreciate, they now have an awful lot of friends and relatives they have never heard from for years are now arriving in town…
And what would Melbourne Cup be without the hats? We also organised an awesome hat contest. People were really creative and the first prize was for Andrew who managed to attach a fake chicken to a Fez (go figure!). Congrats Andrew, you deserve it. It takes a lot of guts to wear a Fez!
All the afternoon was great fun (we think, not an awful lot of people actually remember what happened) and we thank everyone who participated in the organisation of the delicious food and drinks (lots of drinks) and a big thanks to Paul Bannon who made fabulous cocktails for us during the whole afternoon. Congratulations to Mark for winning the beer pong. Why are we not surprised.
Once again thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm, participation and sturdy livers.
For (lots) more photos, check out the album on Facebook (and remember to Like our page while you’re there!)
Adobe’s MAX conference in the US two weeks ago included some interesting announcements. It was particularly exciting to see Adobe firming their commitment to open web technologies, with acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap, and new support for CSS3.
Typekit have a technology and licensing arrangement that allow websites to incorporate a wider range of fonts than has traditionally been supported. Designs regularly warrant the use of more than the standard dozen or so web-safe fonts, be it for brand or aesthetic reasons. Developers have long struggled to support these font choices, with workarounds including image replacement or creative front-end solutions relying on Flash. Neither approach has been good for accessibility though, with images or Flash text missed or misread by screen readers, and with such text failing to respond to user settings such as changes in font size or colour.
More recently, developers found a way to use @font-face, a recent CSS extension with wide, if inconsistent, browser support. Typekit, among other providers, sprang up to simplify the implementation across browsers. More importantly, they’ve been able to work around the other major barrier to custom font use: licensing. Font replacement was long in a dubious gray legal zone, but it was an accepted practice so long as font files weren’t themselves being distributed. The @font-face technique, however, downloads font files to a user’s local machine. The font foundries’ licenses rarely support this sort of distribution.
Typekit demonstrated that people are willing to pay to use custom fonts — via a simple subscription service. We hope that Adobe can bring their own fonts to the table, and use their historical relationships with the font foundries to negotiate licenses for a wider variety of choices.
PhoneGap is a development toolbox that allows cross-platform mobile development using HTML5 and a set of abstracted JavaScript APIs. An open source effort, the programme currently focusses on iPhone and Android, with demonstrated support for Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, and Symbian. With the mobile market increasingly fragmenting, it’s important for developers to be able to support a range of platforms. It’s a bonus that we can do so while maintaining a common code-base, and while using languages and tools that we’re already familiar with as web developers. There’ll always be a place for native development, but for the vast majority of use cases, cross-platform development is the best approach. Moreover, for apps being built around web content or web services, building in web technologies means that we can share capabilities between the apps and client websites themselves, minimising redevelopment, or the amount of content management required.
PhoneGap joins Adobe’s cross-platform Flash Builder support in the mobile development toolbox. Flash Builder allows a developer to build a Flash or Flex-based application for multiple mobile platforms, again encouraging the reuse of common code, potentially with different skins supporting different UI paradigms. We expect Adobe to increase PhoneGap’s capability in actually building applications for multiple devices, and with an injection of support can expect development to keep driving forward, extending support for the different platforms’ APIs.
Finally, Adobe released a proposal, through to the W3C FX task force, of a CSS3 Shaders extension. A minor feature, in the scheme of things, but an interesting data point. The extension allows web developers to use a range of cinematic effects, previously only available when using Flash. While it will take a little longer to gather wide support, we can expect support to be rolled into the most common mobile browsers in the near future. What’s particularly interesting about the release was called out by Adobe’s John Nack:
So, yeah: Adobe’s using Flash-derived technology to make HTML5 more competitive with Flash.
Crazy, right? Not at all: this increases your ability to present visually rich experiences, and that increases Adobe’s ability to sell you tools for creating those experiences. The different playback technologies are just means to those ends.
While we work in Flash and Flex, we’re also strong supporters of open web technologies here at Gruden. It’s exciting to see Adobe embracing the open web (the sometimes-known-as HTML5), and improving the dynamic between the two approaches. We always welcome better tools in the toolbox, and look forward to discovering what Adobe can make of them.
Gruden is pleased to announce that it has been approved for inclusion on the Centrelink Creative and Design panel for the provision Web Design and Development Services. This panel appointment is our third for the federal government, along with IP Australia, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
“Gruden’s inclusion to this key Federal Government panel is fantastic news for us. It’s a testament to the work that we’ve been providing to our valued government Agency clients and permits us to further demonstrate our capabilities and continue delivering on major digital government initiatives” says Gruden’s CEO Todd Trevillion.
Centrelink forms part of the Human Services portfolio and has established the panel in order to source a range of creative and design services for the group of participating Australian government Agencies. Since its inception on 30 October 2009, 12 participating Agencies were part of the newly formed Creative and Design panel. Today, there are 33 participating Agencies across the whole of government.
The range of services that will be provided by Gruden to participating Agencies includes, but is not limited to, Creative Design and Development, Research and Strategy. This includes web design, digital branding, on-line advertising and marketing campaigns, RIA Development (Flash, Flex, AIR, AJAX, Silverlight), Custom Application Development (.NET, Java, CF, PHP), Strategy & Consulting (UX, Business Analysis, Usability, Accessibility, Analytics, SEM, Social Media), Mobile development (Apps, iPhone, android, HTML5 – html/ajax, tablet), CMS frameworks (Adobe CQ5, Sitecore, WordPress) and content services (such as Migration, Language Translation, EDMs, distribution, asset management etc.).
In addition to the above, Gruden will offer Centrelink panel Agencies a comprehensive range of content, campaign, newsletter, asset & digital management systems & tools for any type of project.
A little bit of pressure is a good thing
We’ve been working with Disney Channel for many years but for the very first time we were entrusted with a full refresh for one of the master brands – Playhouse Disney. The US & UK teams had a head start, already in the midst of launching their own interpretations online, so right from the get go there was a little bit of extra pressure to produce the goods.
It all started with a sketch
A series of preliminary sketches were presented which explored a few different themes, one which involved a completely transparent user interface. After working in collaboration with Disney and refining the sketches, a few key screens were designed and an initial look & feel created.
I want one as well
Around this time, neighboring Disney regions started to show a strong interest – wanting to know what Australia was thinking of doing. So we helped prepare a Keynote presentation showcasing intended creative direction & overall site functionality. The presentation went very well and a few regions signed up shortly after, wanting exactly the same thing. The first batch; India, Taiwan & South-East Asia.
Our aim
At the end of the day our aim was simple – create a user-friendly, colorful and engaging website which provided a framework for future growth.
Visit the site at particular times of the day and night….and you might come across a few little surprises.
Throughout recent years, Gruden’s continual focus and drive has been evident within China’s competitive market. Since opening our office in China’s northern Qingdao Software Park in 2008, not only have we been able to expand our business opportunities within China, CEO Todd Trevillion has also been successful in building key relationships – known in the Chinese culture as ‘Guanxi’.
These evolving relationships have assisted us immensely and helped us garner Chinese government support in the form of grants and development incentives. Gruden’s efforts was recently recognized when the company was awarded the ‘Excellence in Service” prize from the Shinan Government at their recent yearly ‘Business Awards’ event.
Our growing Guanxi network has seen us being the honored hosts to a delegation of senior Chinese officials to Australia led by Mr. Lee, Party Secretary of the Shinan District Communist Party along with the Directors of Treasury, Commerce and Zhanshan Subdistrict. Our relationship with such distinguished personages as Mr Lee is particularly important as it opens many doors otherwise closed to our competitors.
Our partnership with SmartTrans (ASX:SMA) within China has given birth to numerous opportunities, most importantly the ability to support, source, localise and rollout mobile applications to China Mobile’s 600 million users, giving Gruden a magnificent opportunity to make an even bigger impact on the China market.
Natalie Apostolou, editor for the MyBusiness Magazine, writes more on Gruden’s perseverance and patience in developing and sustaining a strong Guanxi within the China market. As a result of these key relationships and Gruden’s enduring market focus. To read the full article click here.
Todd Trevillion (CEO) & Dong Wang (China GM) receive Qingdao business award
Driven by a desire to share a wealth of data with their customers, Ausgrid asked Gruden to work with them to design and build an online information tool that makes information about various neighbourhood works accessible to the public. Members of the public, developers and researchers can now access information divided by 39 Local Government Areas (LGA) within Ausgrid’s network. The information covers previously unavailable data such as quarterly residential electricity use, solar power, and streetlight repairs.
Involving collaboration between various teams within Ausgrid, the aim of the Google Maps based application is to showcase the breadth and detail of information about the biggest electricity distribution network in the country. The challenge for Gruden was to create an application that would illustrate all the data available, formatted to compare against different quarters, in an easy to use and uncluttered interface. The tool should highlight the data available and allow its audience to easily interpret the information presented.
At the opening stage of the project, one of the key issues to address was how the data should be presented to the user in the simplest fashion that would allow them to digest all the information available for their Local Government Area, but also switch between data sets and different quarters for comparison. By presenting familiar and simple interfaces, including using the familiar Google Map interface and designing simple graph views, we were able to present the data in a fashion that carried the ethos of the whole project: transparency and simplicity. In this case, simplicity was definitely the best solution.
In addition, developers or interested parties can download a spreadsheet containing the quarterly data behind the map, made available without use restrictions. This allows deeper analysis of the information, comparison between different regions, and republication in different formats and contexts.
Corporate Communications Manager Anthony O’Brien adds:
It gives the entire community a view on many layers of information in their local neighbourhood. We hope that people who access it will find out more about what’s going on in their local area and find ways to use it that suits them.
Gruden built and integrated the tool into Ausgrid’s Sitecore CMS, allowing Ausgrid to provide additional information and supporting links around the data sets and topics, further enhancing the user experience and really supporting the information tool.
Having performed the initial import of data for launch, during the secondary phase of the build we also designed and built a custom upload interface that allows Ausgrid to upload a spreadsheet containing new quarterly data as it becomes available — ensuring the information tool management becomes internally self-sufficient, and the tool itself remains relevant.
As an agency it was exciting to be part of such a pioneering initiative by a client such as Ausgrid, and with the end result gaining great positive feedback at launch, we’re looking forward to seeing how the Neighbourhood Works tool is picked up and integrated into the communities it serves. As the online audience becomes further educated on how to access information, and businesses continue to adapt to the mentality of transparency, we look forward to seeing how others tackle these issues.
Check out the Neighbourhood works map.
© Gruden Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Level 10, 220 George Street
Sydney NSW 2000
P +61 2 8256 5300
F +61 2 8256 5399
sydinfo@gruden.com
Google Map
Level 4, G6, Qingdao Software Park
288 Ningxia Road
Qingdao, China
P +86 532 8872 7020
F +86 532 8872 7023
chinainfo@gruden.cn
Google Map
A very Gruden Christmas
After the coldest and most miserable start to summer in recent memory; the gods smiled on the Friday of the Gruden Christmas Party with a nice warm sunny day to put everyone in a festive mood for a great day ahead.
It was “keyboards down” at midday as the party began with the first order of the day being the decorations.
In keeping with our successful Adobe event theme the office was divided into 6 Pods with each section responsible for decorating its own part of the floor. Prizes were up for grabs and the teams put in a great effort with themes ranging from a full on Snowy Christmas Scene complete with snow ballooons and snowmen, to a Bad Santa stall, “The Vault” where all the money was locked away, Aussie Christmas with remote control floating shark, Traditional Christmas and from the sales team – “The Stolen Christmas” or should we say “Borrowed Christmas” in which they “borrowed” the Christmas tree from the lobby downstairs and asked each of the floors on the way up to help out with the decorations.
The competition was fierce and Brent’s team took out the gong for their impressive sleigh scene and won a lovely Christmas hamper for their efforts.
It was then into the main boardroom for Kris Kringles with the usual funny gifts and Brent hosting which is always a laugh. Stephen was asked to play Santa to hand out the gifts however he politely declined. (wise move with Brent hosting)
Then it was time to move on to the serious stuff at our ready made cocktail arena.
Mondo Bartenders put on a fine exhibition of cocktail mixing and then it was up to each team to discuss and create their own cocktail with prizes up for grabs again.
After some notable successes and some miserable failures Brent’s team came up with the “OH YES” and took top honours yet AGAIN !!
After enjoying quite a few of their own and other teams cocktail creations it was time for everyone to move onto Strike Bowling Alley in Darling Harbour where a great night was had knocking down some pins and singing Karaoke — when anyone could get the mic off Todd
The rest as they say is history; partly because no one can remember past Strike and partly because certain things should remain censored in this family friendly blog space.
Hope you all had a fabulous Christmas party and all the best in the New Year.
Team Gruden.