Blog

Allegedly the president of Kal Kan Pet used to eat a can of the company's dogfood at shareholder meetings.  Fortunately for all concerned JDi have not diversified into the tinned pet food market but have instead taken inspiration from Microsoft, where in 1988 an internal email challenging them to make more use of their own product was entitled "Eating our own dogfood" and if it's good enough for Microsoft...

Joking aside it was about time to overhaul the JDi website with the same care and attention we've been devoting to our clients and what better way to do so than by using our own, recently developed, Drupal distribution called Orchestra.  The carefully selected combination of Adaptive Theme and the Panopoly base distribution gave us all the responsive layouts and flexibility we needed to build our new product pages with the minimum of fuss.  Truth be told, our pre configured work flow system was probably overkill for this project but that's OK, being modular, we've just switched it off! 

The project includes a few custom modules and features including some snazzy parallax scrolling using the stellar.js library and some simple jQuery animations all underpinned by the stability, reliability and accessibility of the Orchestra distribution.

There's really nothing quite like using your own software for giving you a different perspective on things.  All of a sudden you can see the little frustrations that otherwise go unremarked, and fix them!  You can see what works and what doesn't and how people use things in practice, which isn't always how you imagined it when you sat down to develop!  Overall it's been an informing process and we hope you like the new site, we had loads of fun designing and building it!  We've got a few more ideas to explore in future and we'll be blogging about interesting and relevant topics in the months to come so please do come back and see how we're getting on and get in touch if you want to know more.