Eziline's first full year in business was spent doing what new studios do: taking every sensible project, learning what clients in Rawalpindi and Islamabad actually needed, and building a portfolio one site at a time. By the end of 2008 the team had grown from the founding group into a proper studio with design, development and support roles.
The technology of 2008
The big story of the year was Apple opening the iPhone SDK in March and launching the App Store in July. For a web shop in Pakistan it did not change the work immediately, but it changed the questions clients asked. "Will it look right on a phone?" started appearing in briefs, and the answer in 2008 was usually a separate mobile version with a simplified layout.
On the web, jQuery 1.2 made rich interfaces practical without Flash, Google Chrome shipped its first version in September, and the browser wars were back. We standardised on PHP 5 with a home-grown MVC structure, MySQL, and tableless CSS layouts. Every site shipped with a small admin panel so clients could edit their own content, which was still a selling point rather than an expectation.
What we built
- Corporate websites with editable news, galleries and enquiry forms for local businesses, schools and clinics.
- Logo and brand identity work that fed directly into the web projects.
- Flash product presentations and multimedia CDs, which were still a common ask for exhibitions and sales teams.
- The first custom web applications: small booking, listing and inventory tools that went beyond a brochure site.
Lessons from year one
The most useful lesson of 2008 was that clients did not want technology, they wanted outcomes: more enquiries, less admin, a site they were not embarrassed by. That framing drove the move from static pages to dynamic, editable solutions and, within a few years, to the custom web applications and ERP work the company is known for today.
The second lesson was about support. Sites that are launched and forgotten break. We kept the free online support promise from 2007 and it became the reason clients came back with their next project.
Looking ahead
The plan for 2009 was already visible in the enquiry log. Clients wanted sites they could run themselves, which pointed at a proper content management system rather than our own admin panels; and the Android launch in late 2008 meant the mobile question would soon have two answers instead of one. We also decided to stop treating hosting as an afterthought: too many support calls were really server problems, so bringing hosting in-house became a priority. The studio itself needed a second room, a shared code repository (we were still passing zip files around) and a written way of quoting work so that estimates stopped depending on who happened to answer the phone. None of this was glamorous, but it was the groundwork for taking on larger projects, and most of it was in place by the middle of the following year.
