Absolute Orange

Virgin Media

January 2010 to June 2010

Required Skills:   user interface developer

Introduction to Virgin Media:

Virgin Media Online are responsible for design, development and ongoing maintenance of the Virgin Media website as well as affilated sponsorship websites such as Virgin Media Shorts.

Introduction to the Virgin Media Shorts competition and website:

Virgin Media Shorts is an annual competition for amateur film makers. Film makers who register to the website can upload their movies which are published on the website along with their profile information. The website gives registrants the opportunity to rate and comment on films. Finally, The UK Film Council as well as a panel of judges select the shortlist of 12 films from which the ultimate winner is chosen as well as The Peoples Choice Award which is voted for by registered critics to the website. Virgin Media Shorts was in its third year of running.

Description of role:

The development team originally consisted of a project manager, designer, front end developer and back end developer and this was increased to 2 front end developers and 2 lead developers in April

It was agreed that in order to improve the efficiency of the website the entire front end of the Virgin Media Shorts website would be removed from Symphony and built on a PHP Codeigniter framework. Symphony would be used as the CMS and datasource.

Amy Varga was responsible for all aspects of UX / UI design and interface development on the Virgin Media Shorts website. The front end of the website was built on a PHP Codeigniter platform and uses Symphony XML queries to extract data from the CMS and database. Web pages were built using standards compliant, browser compatible and platform compatible XHTML and CSS. They made extensive use of jQuery and Ajax for improved user experience.

The website was managed using Agile project management techniques and maintained using SVN versioning.