Favorite Projects of 2008

by Jonathan Longnecker in Design, Business, ExpressionEngine

Raise your hand if you can’t believe it’s almost 2009 already. Yep I’ve got mine up! It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’re having fun. The last year has definitely been an interesting one, and we’re looking forward to this next year with great expectation and excitement. I can honestly say that God has blessed us with the best jobs and families in the world. What more can a guy ask for?

I thought about writing some sort of “resolution” or goals post for the new year, but instead I think sometimes it’s good to reflect on what you’ve done. You might even amaze yourself. Looking back over all of our projects this past year, I was surprised at just how much we’d done with a small two man shop. Apparently we’ve been busy .

For those of you who just recently found us, here’s a quick recap of our favorite projects this past year. Hope you enjoy!

Web Design Projects

EdgePoint Church

No surprise this was one of our favorites. It came together very quickly and got a ton of attention from Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall, Collide Magazine and Godbit. Links: Portfolio | Live Site

The Gory Details! - Recording Little Rooms

by Nate Croft in Music

Up until a few days ago, you probably only knew FortySeven Media as those guys that make kick-awesome websites. But before there was a FortySeven Media, there was rock! (Insert Jack Black-like air guitar solo here.)

You see, back before Jon and I started FortySeven Media, we started a band with a couple of our friends. We wrote lots of songs, played more shows than we could keep track of, and didn’t record nearly enough. In fact, only one full length album and one EP was all that existed of our years of hard work. But in 2004, we decided to fix that.

How We Use ExpressionEngine: Templates and Global Variables

by Jonathan Longnecker in Tutorials, ExpressionEngine

Continuing in our series of how we use ExpressionEngine, I thought it would be cool to show you the power and flexibility of the templates in conjunction with global variables.

One of the main reasons we started using EE was it's flexibility. Other CMS's make you cram your design into their pre-defined templates and make you dig around in huge PHP files. Not so with EE! We code every site from scratch by hand, first creating a static version that we can test in multiple browsers. Then we chop it up into our own templates on our own terms inside EE.

FREE Song Download from Heroes or Ghosts New Album

by Jonathan Longnecker in Business, Music

It’s been one crazy year here at 47m, and we’re doing our best to go out with a bang! It may come as a surprise to you, but we do more than design cool websites. We also make the rock and roll. And we finally have some of the rock and roll to share with you. Now between the two of us, I’m not the engineer so I’ll leave the gory technical details to Nate, but I can honestly say it sounds pretty awesome. The two of us wrote and recorded everything, not to mention playing almost every instrument on the album. Needless to say it’s taken a while. Like 5 years. And that’s another story entirely. But it’s finally done!

So in the spirit of Christmas, we would like to give you one of these songs and let you listen to a few others. We sincerely hope you love it.

Web Designer Wall Lists 47m in Their Best of 2008 List

by Jonathan Longnecker in Design

We meant to post this a little earlier, but we’re happy to report that Web Designer Wall has listed our site in the Top 50 best CSS designs of 2008! We’re honored to be among the company of the others chosen; every single one is just amazing. If you haven’t already, go check out Nick La’s amazing resource site for web designers.