2008 - Freerange Future

2008

Featured Work

The Wheatsheaf Hotel

This was our first collaboration with the super-talented Amy Milhinch, who went on to become our creative director. The brief: a website for everyone’s favourite brew pub, the Wheaty.

Amy created that chalkboard aesthetic that became the instantly recognisable Wheaty brand — and the site was a custom build in Ruby on Rails. For Freerange, this was a turning point. We were starting to move away from Flash and into more powerful, scalable, web-standards-based platforms.

Wheaty Redux

The Wheatsheaf site was redeveloped in 2012, and that site is still running today. It’s an almost pixel-for-pixel remake of the original, with extra interactivity, built on Gluttonberg, our homegrown CMS. The 2012 rebuild also powered the custom Wheaty iPhone app we developed. The app listed every exotic and obscure beer on tap at the pub, and sent push notifications whenever a new keg was tapped. Craft beer fans were known to drop everything and rush to the Wheaty the moment a notification hit their phone.

The Wheaty app received a commendation from the Webby Awards — possibly the only pokie-free community brew pub in the world to receive that honour.

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Our custom CMS

Gluttonberg

A decade before WordPress had Gutenberg, Freerange had Gluttonberg. The brainchild of our self taught genius developer Luke Sutton, it was a custom Rails-based content management system, developed because… that’s what agencies did in those days. It powered most of our websites for five years or more, until we eventually came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t viable to keep investing in a proprietary CMS when there were better resourced, open-source options out in the marketplace.

Digital in 2008

The App Store launched with 500 apps. Android arrived. Spotify started streaming. And a pseudonymous paper on something called “Bitcoin” quietly appeared online.

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