Position: Front End Web Developer

Location: Durham, NC

Employment: Part Time to Full Time

Start Date: April/May

Company Description
Cuberis is a design firm located in the historic tobacco district of downtown Durham.  Since the company’s launch 8 years ago, our goal has always been to provide our clients cost effective design solutions born from creativity and paired with technical expertise. To find out more about Cuberis, visit www.cuberis.com and take a look at our online portfolio. Cuberis is growing quickly (50% in 2011 alone) and offers employees a dynamic and exciting work environment.

Position Description

Front end web developer with WordPress customization and strong styling (CSS) skills needed. The position will begin as part-time and transition to full-time over the Summer dependent on performance. The candidate should be comfortable working underneath a senior coder to create websites based on the design team’s concepts. While the candidate will be supervised and introduced to many advanced skill sets, a thorough understanding of HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress, browser compatibility as well as basic image editing skills in Photoshop are required.

The ideal candidate will be a strong problem solver with a good eye for design and be able to collaborate with several other team members to arrive at the foundation, structure, and final online solutions for a variety of projects. A solid understanding of jQuery, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, Drupal, and MySQL are all pluses, while a willingness to constantly expand one’s knowledge of coding is a must. Our sites use customized content management systems (mainly WordPress and some Drupal) and backend databases and experience with these is highly desired.

Compensation will be based on experience.

Key Competencies

• Building websites that match the design team’s mockups
• Detail orientated and able to meet deadlines
• Using creative solutions for a variety of online projects
• Writing clean code that performs well across multiple browsers
• Maintenance and updates to existing client websites
• Constantly striving to expand coding abilities

Technical Skills Required

• Strong CSS and HTML
• WordPress customization
• PHP & database experience

Desired Skills

• Drupal customization
• jQuery, Javascript, Ajax, HTML5, CSS3

How to Apply

• Send your resume and cover letter to jobs@cuberis.com
• In the cover letter, include links to your work and explain what you’ve coded on the sites (front-end, back-end, technologies used, etc.).

Location:  Durham, NC (downtown)

Schedule: Full-time position (part-time 2 week training period initially)

Start Date:  March
Company Description
Cuberis is a design firm located in the historic tobacco district of downtown Durham.  Since the company’s launch 8 years ago, our goal has always been to provide our clients cost effective design solutions born from creativity and paired with technical expertise. To find out more about Cuberis, visit www.cuberis.com and take a look at our online portfolio. Cuberis is growing quickly (50% in 2011) and offers employees a dynamic and exciting work environment.

Position Description
The Project Manager is an important part of a great team of Cuberis employees and is responsible for the success of all projects at Cuberis through careful planning, timely monitoring, and clear communication. This individual is responsible for coordination and completion of project goals on-time and on-budget. They will perform a variety of tasks including setting deadlines, assigning responsibilities, monitoring progress, summarizing achievements, mitigating setbacks, and managing scope and client change requests. The Project Manager will be responsible for a variety of projects in both scale and type (web design, print, coding, etc.) and will need to manage many projects simultaneously.

Ideal candidates will be well organized, have exceptional communication skills, attention to detail, and the ability to multi-task. The ability to interpret data and present recommendations is key.  An understanding of milestones involved in Web Development projects (such as strategic planning, overall design, user experience, interactive development, and production) is strongly desired.

Key Competencies

• Oversee the timely flow of multiple tasks and projects in the department’s work queue from conception through completion while monitoring resource utilization and goals
• Collaborate with managers and production teams to intelligently schedule internal/external resources (partners and 3rd party vendors)
• Manages day-to-day client interaction through phone and email as a primary liason (must have great phone skills)
• Prepare and assist with estimates and proposals
• Prepare and send invoices to clients and manage accounts receivables
• Regularly communicate status of all projects by means of weekly meetings, status reports, daily updates, & project flow boards
• Identify, anticipate and resolve potential problems/issues, and know when to notify Manager when scope, budget, quality control or timeline are at risk
• Pull resource reports, analyze performance data and provide executive summaries
• Help define efficient, productive work-flow processes as well as quality control processes
• Facilitate and add input to internal teams in developing creative solutions in kickoff meetings and progress reviews during the design and coding phases

Requirements and Experience

• 2-3 years relevant work experience
• Bachelor’s degree
• Excellent organization and communication skills, with an exceptional eye for detail
• Ability to prioritize, multitask and work with minimal supervision
• Demonstrated ability to interact with executives, team members, partners and customers with diplomacy and tact
• Demonstrated ability to diplomatically enforce deadlines and solve problems in an efficient and professional manner
• Proactive, self-starter that can maintain an upbeat positive attitude
• Possess a strong work ethic and take pride in the quality of their work

Technical Skills Necessary to apply

• Strong computer skills are required, focusing in Word, Excel, & Powerpoint
• Strong knowledge of the functionality of interactive web, design and development tools (WordPress, Drupal, etc)
• Experience in ActiveCollab software.  If not then in a comparable online platform such as Basecamp, Open Project, Sales Force, SugarCRM, Torch, or ManyMoon

Desired Skills

• PMP Certification and/or 2-3 years relevant work experience.
• Base level of Quickbooks accounting

How To Apply

• Send your resume and cover letter to jobs@cuberis.com
• In the cover letter, explain your relevant experience and skills, and describe your project management philosophy
• If selected for an interview, be prepared to discuss your previous successful and failed projects and to show supporting documents (plans, calendars, spreadsheets, software used, etc.)

Fun Fact: Google was originally called ‘backrub’ but that name was later dropped in favor of a play on the spelling of Googol, the number 1 with 100 zeros after it.

While the exact algorithm for determining the pagerank of Page X remains a closely guarded secret, it’s generally accepted that Page X’s pagerank is more or less determined by the summation of ( pagerank / out-links ) of all pages linking to Page X. This means the more pagerank a page already has, the more it will pass along to the pages it links to.

Using only pagerank, Google has no idea what your site is about, it’s just a measure of authority. So when you type a search term into Google, what exactly happens? Why are the results so accurate?  Well that’s another closely guarded secret, but my best guess is that Google will match your search query against it’s enourmous datastore of over a trillion pages and find records with matching text, then it sort these results by pagerank and some other factors including results from relevancy algorithms and penalties.  That sorted list what’s served up as the results for that search query.

This time, they not only wanted a place on the web to display their services to potential clients, but they also wanted a custom built system that would allow their field technicians to complete reports out in the field — while they are inspecting properties — and take the office staff minimal time to turn those field reports into service reports that their clients can view online.

In summary, their functionality requirements were:

• 3 levels of users to log into the site: Administrators, Field Technicians, and Clients
• Administrators can manage services, properties, and site visits
• Field Techs can submit site visit reports
• Clients can view their properties and completed site visit reports
• Properties have a set of default services, based on a set of pre-defined property types
• Site visits will have those default services for the property, but can be changed by Administrators on the fly.
• Administrators assign Field Techs to a site visit
• Fields Techs need to be able to fill out site visit reports on a mobile device.

With all the recent updates to WordPress, we knew that was the system we wanted to use to build out a custom CMS that could also handle all the custom reports we would need to create. I looked into several pre-built CRM (customer relationship management) plugins for WordPress but none of them fit the functionality we needed, so I decided to build one from scratch. The only plugins I used to help were: User Role Editor and Theme My Login. Those two plugins allowed me to create 3 levels of users with different permissions for what they can do on the website. They also have custom login pages that take them to their specific dashboards for viewing/managing their reports.

Usually when we create a WordPress website for clients, we make custom themes. This time, we created a custom plugin in addition to the usual custom theme. The custom plugin added 3 new custom post types: Services, Properties, and Site Visits. Each Service has a set of checklist items, which tell the Field Tech what needs to be completed at the Site Visit. The Service also has a custom taxonomy where it is assigned to a property type. Services and Properties share that custom taxonomy. This is so that when a Property is assigned a property type, the Services for that property type are automatically included.

The part of this custom buildout that will be most heavily used is the Site Visit custom post type. Administrators will create a Site Visit in the system each time a property needs to be inspected. They will choose a Property and all the default Services for that Property will be automatically included in the Site Visit. The Services can then be customized further if necessary. Once a Field Tech is assigned to a Site Visit, the Site Visit will appear on their dashboard with the date that it is to be completed. We made a custom mobile theme for the Site Visit admin edit screen so that Field Techs can easily fill out their reports on an iPhone. To do this, I used techniques from responsive web design like CSS media queries. If the screen is only as wide as Mobile Safari on iOS for the iPhone, then a different stylesheet is loaded. It’s pretty cool!

After a Field Tech completes a Site Visit report, an Administrator is notified. They can then make any notes for the client, or add photos taken in the field and then publish the report for the Client to view. When a client logs into the system, they get a list of all their Properties. After clicking on a property, they can see a schedule of upcoming site visits, and a list of previous site visits with all the reports available to view.

If you made it this far in reading this blog post, congratulations and I’m sorry. I managed to confuse myself about 10 times just in writing this, so I can just imagine what it must be like to someone outside my head. My point is, WordPress really can do so much more than just the basic portfolio or blog website. If you are interested in some big custom functionality, WP can probably do it for you. We love to take on exciting projects like this one so contact us for your web development needs!

To me, that’s what makes Raleigh the perfect place for a conference celebrating big ideas and the future of digital media. The Triangle is young and booming. It is both a hotbed for startups and plays home to big companies like Cisco, IBM and Lenovo. In the midst of the great recession, the Triangle is owning its creativity, evolving, and thriving. Maybe that’s why in just the past few months Raleigh has been named Forbes’ Best Places for Business and Careers, ‘Best American City’ by BusinessWeek, and both Raleigh and Durham ranked in the top five of The Daily Beast’s Smartest Cities in America list.

It all brings me back to an awesome insight my grandfather once gave me: In order to be influential, you have to be influenceable. Raleigh, Durham, and this week’s Internet Summit all embody that idea really well. It’s about taking in new ideas in order to build businesses that connect. It’s about bending and occasionally obliterating the status quo and business and usual. Or in the pithy words of keynote speaker Gary Vaynerchuk, “Way too many people in this space are trying to hit ground-rule doubles. I’m trying to hit that sh*t out of the park.”

Stay tuned for updates from the conference and my wrap-up on Thursday.

The good news is that it’s because we’ve been so busy doing our {real} jobs! (The other good news is that there is no bad news.) We actually have been working on quite a few pretty exciting projects and we look forward to sharing them with you when we’re done, but for now here’s a little sneak peek of the action:

A new direction we’ve recently taken has been to provide targeted marketing solutions for a variety of clients. Because much of our work has consisted of branding and social media, we’ve been doing a kind of marketing for years, but have recently broken out more into the wider field. If you’re in or around Durham, you might have heard of Endangered Durham. The online archive of Durham architecture and history is moving to Open Durham and we are helping make that happen! We did some light campaign marketing to make the community aware of the new site including a new logo, buttons (like the physical kind you pin onto things), a scavenger hunt, and Facebook, Twitter, and QR codes for a sneak preview of the new site. We are also working with a new local restaurant not only to come up with a name, but also for identity, branding, launch marketing, and who knows what else!

Our design team is currently working on some website and CMS designs for a few different barber schools, a locally-based high-volume pharmacy, and several local wedding vendors (including a wedding planner and a wedding venue).

Our coding team has been pretty holed up working on a huge variety of websites. One that we are pretty excited about is a re-design and re-coding of a stormwater management system specialist we first designed a website for about 5 years ago! As well as creating a freshly designed WordPress website for them, we are designing a mobile system for their inspectors to submit evaluations and photos of their properties in the field, which can then be easily turned into PDF reports for their clients. Fun! We are also working on another completely custom CMS project for a human resources/talent management firm.

Whew, that’s a large part of what’s been keeping us all so busy, in a nutshell. Of course, that’s not all, so keep an eye out for some more updates from us soon!

We designers are passionate about our work, and we tend to get attached to certain ideas or designs quite easily. It’s expected, but our favorite designs are not always the designs that are chosen. Several months ago we had one such discussion with a client, the end result being that our favorite design was not chosen. Disappointed, I did a bit of research, wondering how other designers handled this situation. I found an article that provided this valuable insight: “The client didn’t pick your favorite design, huh? Well, that’s probably because you weren’t listening to what they wanted in the first place.” This hit me hard. I thought, wow, I know I’m guilty of that.  My problem seemed to be looking at site design and saying “this is going to look great!” rather than “This is going to satisfy all the client’s needs and goals!” So I wondered, how can I approach this differently, making sure to design for the client’s desired hierarchy and not for what looks best?

Enter wireframes. I had seen other design houses use wireframes when beginning a new project, and it was something I wanted us to try. A wireframe (see below) is a simple black and white layout of what elements we want to use where. It seems pretty simple, but it’s incredibly effective. If we find out early in the process that a client really wants a certain element to be prominent, we can move it accordingly before we begin applying design elements (colors, photos, text treatments, and so forth). In some cases, our clients don’t always know what they want before we begin the site design, so this really helps them decide what they want early on in the process. This prevents what otherwise can often happen; a client waits until design is done before asking to move things around or rework parts of the site, which results in the site becoming overcrowded, disorganized, or unbalanced. By setting the framework first, we are able to establish that the pieces are all in the right place, and then the design comes very easily.

But now, we are asking for your help.

The Mockup Manager began as a way to display web mockups to our clients, but it has grown be so much more. Lydia and Ray use it almost every day to show not only web mockups to clients, but also graphic design mockups, and stock photography selections. Andrew and Adam have even adopted it to use it to show portfolio pieces to prospective clients.

We are looking for a name that will reflect this wide range of use of applications. So leave us a comment below, on our Facebook wall, or send us a Tweet with a winning name! If we pick your name, we’ll bake you some cookies!

Thanks to all of us, we now have 2 new plaques on our trophy case! We recently participated in GoTriangle’s SmartCommute Challenge, where we pledged to either walk, bike, take the bus, participate in a carpool or vanpool, or telecommute (read Alisa’s blog post about her fantastic experience with the challenge here). Between the 6 of us in the office, we covered all the bases except for carpool/vanpool and ended up winning the highest employee participation (by percentage) out of all the participating companies.

We are also proud to announce that we now have 2 prize-winning photographers on our staff. Alisa won 1st place in the SmartCommute Photo Contest for her photo of Andrew biking to work. Andrew was not only the prize-winning model in the 1st place photo, but also won 3rd place for a photo of his 2 primary modes of transportation: his bike and a bus (but not his bus). Way to go Alisa and Andrew!