Over the last few months we have been working on a complete redesign of Elastacloud.com. We have decided to try and make the site more user friendly by increasing the amount of information visible to the user with a more long-form style to the page. We aimed to create a more delicate feel to the page, by trying to strike a balance between white-space and our new, redesigned cog graphics. If you're interested in how it was built, I'll be posting another post shortly. In the meantime feel free to check out the newly refreshed site , or take a look at the preview below. Old: New:

When I first started working in IT you started knowing little and aspired to be that person in the office who knew everything. These people were the Googles and Bings of the office environment, just without the ads but often with the same levels of bias. A couple of years ago I heard someone describing what the modern Software Architect is; they described the role not as someone who knows everything but as someone who can surround themselves with people who, collectively, do. It wasn't until I heard this description that I realised it was, in part, true. That there is seldom a single know-it-all in the office, but rather a group of people who collectively have that knowledge. It's not the entire story, there is still a modern set of skills people need to have around locating information and learning how to apply it to their particular problem (more on this in a later post). One of the great things about being part of the Elastacloud team is that we have that group of people who collectively understand a lot, not only in terms of technical skills but also the softer skills such as presentation and communication. It's also a group of people who are continuously watching for new technologies and ways of working so that we can bring those innovations to our customers. Like many eyes can make all bugs shallow , having many minds can make all challenges solvable, making this just one of joys of having the right kind of people around you.

­Hey guys, you’ve probably realised but this post is just to let you know we’ve updated the design of channels! Old: New: This has been done in order to bring in a bit more of consistency through the branding of Elastacloud. Much like the old version of the main site ( www.elastacloud.com – mentioned in my previous post ) the colour scheme of channels revolved around dark blues and blacks, which we have switched for whites and lighter blues in an attempt to brighten the brand and create a more pleasant feel for all users of the site. Within the next few months, we will be further redesigning channels. We will hopefully be creating a bespoke, self-created site; as opposed to using Wix’s CMS as we do at the moment. The redesign will again be in line with the new branding colours and light styling which is starting to move across all visual aspects of Elastacloud. The main reason for this decision is due to an outage we had over the last week or so due to an issue with an update that Wix rolled out which broke users’ ability to log into their accounts or post anything. Luckily this has now been fixed and although Wix were helpful in repairing the bug, we would much rather be able to have full control over the workings of Channels. I’ll keep you up to date with any further updates to both the main site and Channels.