The Philosophy & Story Behind Numonium
How We Stand Above the Rest
We at Numonium are a talented team of media innovators and professionals who are committed to delivering stellar products whilst pushing the envelope.
Do you like cake?
Everybody likes cake. Who could be opposed to cake? But we all know that each cake is unique; each a slightly different combination of ingredients, family tradition, measurements, cooking times, and decoration. We've had cakes from the standard slightly-moist yellow, to someone's relative's overcooked and poorly-frosted, to the most satisfying, decadent, delicious piece of moist, incredible, double-chocolate cake with just the perfect amount of sweetness: not too much, but just enough so every little bite beautifully complements the supreme texture of the cake itself.
What we're getting at here is that websites, much like cakes, are unique. Each has a slightly different combination of tools, identity, size, production time, and design; or at least we think of them that way. At Numonium, we don't believe that any two websites are truly alike, so why should they ever receive equal treatment?
Each website needs to be treated with respect
Would you spend the same amount of time making a basic, unfrosted yellow cake versus a heavily decorated, multi-tier wedding cake with different colors, fillings, and frostings? Didn't think so. Do you think an online store should take the same amount of time as a virtual business card? Absolutely not.
Other web designers may use a templated system to design the look of your website. They may say it's “simple”, “quick”, and “easy”, but in reality they cut corners to reduce the perceived quality of your website. In order for your website to succeed, it needs to make a mark on the Web.
At Numonium, we thoroughly consult with each client to ensure that we get all the ingredients for our recipe for success. We go through great strides to make sure that your website tastes as good as the most satisfying piece of cake you have ever had.
Give us a call today at (412) 254-3086 to discuss how we can bake something wonderful for you!
Humble Beginnings
Founded in 2004, Numonium have spent the last nine years deconstructing and understanding how people use computers, and how they solve everyday business problems via the Internet. Numonium is the brainchild of founder Eric Newman, a graduate of the University of Central Florida, where he received a Bachelors of Art in Digital Media, along with minors in both Computer Science and Secure Computing and Networks. Eric has spent the last ten years programming, researching, innovating, and finding a better way of presenting and implementing beautiful aesthetic and logical works of art.
At Numonium, we are fluent in the latest in web design and development technologies: Apache, Windows Server, Unix Server, PHP5, mySQL, JavaScript, Java, xHTML/HTML5, and CSS3, and specialize in combining them to deliver amazing products at a reasonable cost. We at Numonium have become known for our “from-scratch” design style – all our websites are created with a blank canvas and a blank document in a text editor. This ensures all our wonderful clients receive a truly unique online experience that they can call their own.
Our Reach
We try to have the broadest industrial reach possible, rather than catering to just one industry or vertical market. Our sites range from identity web sites for businesses, to complete, dynamic social networks. We deliver to any type of business, so give us a call if we pique your interest.
In addition to serving a wide variety of business sizes and industries, we at Numonium have professionally created, installed and supported all pieces of the online experience: from building and installing network servers, setting and administering whole computer networks, designing accessible and beautiful user interfaces, and programming all the logic to make everything work.
So call us today at (412) 254-3086 to discuss how we can transform your online experience.
The Year is 2014
Over the last ten years (or so), we have seen an evolution in websites: going from the basic, unstyled, unorganized page, loaded with animated GIFs, guestbooks and marquees, to sleek, svelte, organized pieces of aesthetic, semantic, and logical art.
Since 2000, websites have changed shape, broadened their use of colors and graphics, and now offer a sophisticated set of services, which allow for a website to feel like a desktop application running on your computer.
What have also notably evolved, over the last five to ten years, are conventions: things which designers and developers are obliged to follow to ensure general usability and aesthetic appeal of their site. That is, people are used to seeing websites modelled a certain way, so if you design your website in this fashion, people will generally be able to get around. Having a logo in the top-left, a top-horizontal or left navigation, footer with site-map at the bottom, and content in the dead center, are all commonplace conventions used on most websites today.
This compulsory conformity is a double-edged sword. Although it did allow for the Web to iterate, evolve, and flourish, it significantly stifled innovation. At Numonium, we live to innovate – conventionality belongs to yesterday.
Rather than the top-left, our logo is positioned in the bottom-right; rather than a top-horizontal navigation, ours is placed at the bottom. We have produced an incredibly usable design that scales up and down to maximize the use of any screen – from mobile phone to laptop to projector, rather than binding to a particular size.
It may sound simple, but our design turns ten years of web convention on its head. And it still works, doesn't it?
Give us a call today at (412) 254-3086 to discuss how Numonium can innovate for your business; ensuring that you make the same bold statement online as you do for your industry.
Could We Do Better?
This site was originally designed in 2009, during a time of transitioning technologies on the Web. “Web 2.0” sites had matured, but the iPad had yet to be introduced. Most web traffic was, at the time, still primarily done on computer, and mobile websites (more importantly - alternative modes of viewing) were significantly less important than they are be today.
Our site was designed to be timeless, but its implementation reeks of the late 2000s. The site scales well vertically, but isn't truly responsive, and some bugs make it annoying to use on certain mobile devices and orientations.
We've invested some time in a modern implementation of our design — something HTML5 and CSS3 — but two small bugs in WebKit are stymieing our progress:
- WebKit will not resize fonts with the viewport; you must refresh the page to get fonts to scale with viewport units
- WebKit will not render borders with viewport units despite being supported elsewhere
As a result, we're going to stick with this design for the time being. Just know that the good folks at Numonium are hard at work on the bleeding edge of web design — we're creating pages that are “too new” for the Internet :)