Recently  websites designed and built at Creative Jar have been featured in Smashing Magazine for their outstanding design and UI. We keep a close eye on Smashing Magazine as it is an industry leader in these fields, and also highlights other awesome website designs and features that have recently been released.

I picked up on an article on Smashing Magazine over the extended easter weekend, showing that it's not only Creative Jar that keeps their eye on this, in fact it has about 4 million users. Without blowing our trumpet, this highlights what a great team we have here at Creative Jar and that our work is so highly regarded

Been working with the new ASP.net pager control and i must say I'm impressed

when it was all .net framework 2.0, we'd been working with a nice little usercontrol which handled all it's postback internally and we had pretty good control over the markup.  Then .net 3.5 comes on the scene with it's listview and pager, so we thought we should give them a go

It was a partially good experience but the lack of mark-up control was pretty limiting.  I'm not much of a front-end guy so i just plumped for the standard layout and went with that.  However, as our front-end guys show much more attention to look & feel than I do, they demanded better markup, nicer buttons, parameterised visibility, the lot basically

We saw there was a TemplatePagerField node for the datapage and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.templatepagerfield.aspx showed us we could literally spoon any kind of controls and mark-up into it.  The server side functinalty opened my eyes to some new counters i didn't even know existed.  I was used to the listitem having a container, kind of like a row in a database, but the pagers container is actually the entire collection of rows.  Kind of obvious when i think about it as i was only ever throwing it the whole set and it did it's thang and paged the data as required.

Also, you can have any combination of fields so you can still use the standard pager ones.  i particularly like the page buttons one which gives you a link to each page so the users are not forced to keep pressing next and previous to get to the products 

check it out though.  Saved us loads of time recently :¬)

On Friday 5th December the Creative Jar, Creative Sharepoint & Creative Jar Technology teams donned our finest glad rags and headed to London for our Christmas party at this years venue of choice – The London Dungeons. After an interesting journey of rides and halls of mirrors we made it to the main room somewhat parched and keen to locate the bar and complementary champagne reception. All in all it was a great night enjoyed by all and a small selection of the photos (censored internally) can be seen below!

Who can say that Creative Jar don't enter in the seasonal spirit?! In light of the American celebration of Hallows, our Creative and Technical Teams pitted against each other to see who could produce the pumpkin sculpture worthy of a creative agency! The results were interesting...it would seem our Technical team are harbouring some secret creative skills! If only the opposite was true and we would be one multi-talented agency but that's another story!

Rob, Greg (Creative Team) and Ben, Alexey (Technical Team) were given one pumpkin each to make unique in order to win 1st Prize! After some close calls involving the very possible loss of fingers, the results were fantastic. Some were more loyal to their trade, involving the CJ logo and C# - others were just made to look scary! There was minimum blood loss which means Health & Safety were also kept happy.

Our (not so) independent adjuticator declared Greg the overall winner! Thanks to everyone for standing outside in the cold to watch & take part!

Vanessa came in super early this morning, to create a spooky Halloween Grotto.

Check out the photo below:

Her pumpkin wasn’t entered in to the ‘Pumpkin Off’,  she had to give the guys a chance after all. What do you reckon?

On the 16th of August the CJ summer sizzler took place attracting a crowd of 50 - made up of CJ employees & their friends & family. The directors made their contributions- Alex made his home made speciality chicken, Bill was in charge of the BBQ (but got bored) & Joe made sure nobody's glasses ever reached half empty! There was no food poisoning, a huge range of food..burgers,sausages,pasta,samosas (that we were all eating for weeks after!) & the weather even held out.  It was a brilliant day for all involved & a good time was had by all!

So the builders have been into the studio and taken out the wall in the Technical room, now Directors Billy and Al are taking out the remaining bricks where the wall used to be. Keep up the good work lads!

It's Monday afternoon in the studio, our attention turned to the donuts sat in the corner of the room teasing us.
A quick discussion on how many someone could eat within a minute soon turned into a competition.
We timed eachother to see who could eat a donut the quickest.

Times are as follows:
Alex - 24
Nat - 33
Alexy - 32
Tim - 49
Rob - 42
Matt - 36

Can you beat Alex's time of 24 seconds?

As usual, we spend all our time on client work and rarely get the opportunity to update our own site. But we've just updated all the profiles. Check out our team page.

But theres room for more, if your interested contact us.