2009 was the year the web stopped being something you built from scratch every time. WordPress 2.7 through 2.9 turned a blogging tool into a content management platform with proper plugin and theme systems, and Android went from a single handset to a real alternative to the iPhone. Eziline spent the year leaning into both.
WordPress as the default CMS
Until 2009 most of our editable sites ran on a custom PHP admin. That year we started delivering WordPress for content-heavy clients: custom themes designed in Photoshop and hand-coded, custom post types for products and staff, and a handful of plugins for forms, galleries and SEO. Clients got a familiar editor, we got a platform to build on rather than rebuild, and the sites were easier to hand over. Our own site ran on WordPress from then until the 2026 rebuild.
Android and the mobile question
Android 1.5 and 1.6 shipped on the first wave of handsets and immediately mattered more in our market than the iPhone did, because the phones were affordable. We built our first native Android prototypes in 2009 in Java with the early SDK, mostly companion apps for clients' web systems: a lookup here, a form there. Mobile was still a side project, but it was clear the two platforms would both need serving.
Around the studio
- The team grew again and the graphic design side took on more print and branding work alongside the web projects.
- We began offering hosting and domain management so clients had one number to call for everything.
- Internships continued every summer; teaching juniors on live projects was already the way the company trained people.
Looking back, 2009 set the pattern for the next decade: adopt the platform the market is moving to, build a repeatable service around it, and keep the custom development muscle for the problems a platform cannot solve.
Looking ahead
Two things were obvious by December 2009. First, Flash was on borrowed time: the iPhone would not run it, and HTML5 video was already good enough for most of what clients used Flash for. We started quietly building our multimedia work in standards-based HTML, CSS and JavaScript so that nothing would need rewriting later. Second, hosting was becoming a product. Cloud servers were suddenly affordable, and the next year we would move production work off shared hosting entirely. On the people side, the plan was to formalise the internship programme into a proper syllabus with mentors and a final project, because the ad-hoc version was working but did not scale. And on the sales side, the first enquiries from overseas Pakistanis wanting sites for businesses abroad hinted at an export market that would take another decade to become the London and Paris offices.
