Having been working on the site 9 months I'm delighted to announce that the new Amber site is now live, see: www.amber-online.com

Amber is a film & photography collective based in Newcastle upon Tyne, incorporating Amber Films, Side Gallery, Side Cinema and Side Cafe. For the first time the site allows an integrated presentation of their work, including many of their films and exhibitions from the last 40 years.

Built using Ruby on Rails by Jonathan Barratt the site has some great features including a full content and image management system, events calendar, e-shop, forum, RSS feed, and our favourite 'Random Amber'. Working closely with Amber we adopted Agile project management techniques (more like Scrum Jonathan tells me) to help us through. While not appropriate for all projects it enabled us to response to new ideas as they emerged, thus avoiding some of the usual pitfalls of web development - but finding some new ones in the process!

We are delighted - not just to see it go live, but to have helped develop a site that Amber are excited about growing over the coming months and years.

While working on the site I have often lost myself in the content - their archives hold some truly inspirational documentary work and include gems such as the Weegee Collection and Houden Victory Club (that will be the allotment connection). You'll even find a couple of my early images if you look hard enough, hopefully more will be added soon.

Labels: internet, photography