Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Website Design
Google responds to Bekko threat
Nov 5th
As we reported previously, Bekko the new alternative search engine platform that uses slashtags assigned to websites to removes spam websites when searched has as we predicted forced Google to respond.
In an update to the Google blog this morning Google is prompting it’s users to report spam websites. They have recently released a Chrome plug-in which makes reporting spam websites much easier.
Spam websites will always be a frustration when your searching online, seems Bekko idea is a good one but will all websites adopt the slash tag method or will Google just increase their spam algorithms?
Either way it is good news for the end user.
Let us know what you think?
Blekko the alternative Search Engine which eliminates Spam
Nov 1st
Blekko a $24 million venture backed project which has been in the making for over 3 years has been launched its pubic BETA version. With this initial roll out Blekko are also releasing several new features for both mainstream and the sites super users.
Blekko is designed to eliminate spam searches using its proprietary slash tag technology. Basically the search engine checks all queries to see if they fall within one of seven main categories, health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every search that is made that is recognised to be in one of these categories Blekko technology will assign the correct slash tag and display only results that are relevant to the search.
Webmasters and Blekko super users are able to apply slashtags to their URL’s so that Blekko can read them , this is aimed at stopping spam results such as huge link farms and bad neighborhood sites which are not maintained.
Don’t panic if your business does not fall within the initial seven categories, like our main keywords: ‘website design’, ‘Ecommerce Web Design‘, ‘social media’, ‘search engine optimisation’,etc… Blekko has plans to release more as time goes on, they are just starting with the biggest traffic sites More >
Website Design For London (Soho) Design Agency
Oct 29th
We are proud to highlight one of our latest website design projects for the Soho Design Agency FTP that specialise in packshot photography for products. We recommend their services to our ecommerce web design clients that need professional images of their products for their online businesses. Having good images on your ecommerce web design makes a huge difference in the overal impression your browsers get when visiting your website making the products more inticing.
The guys at FTP had a very specific brief as the majority of their clients use big 30” screens so the reolution had to be right and the website had to fill the biggest of screens aswell as the smallest.
We acheived this by a clever piece of coding which created a scaleable background image so what ever size monitor the images look good. We also added a nice touch when you go into the website, which ever image is currently being shown as you click ‘enter ftp digital’ will fade to a blurred version and become the websiet background image.
We also implemented an advance technique to re-write the font so we could stylise it to exactly hiow FTP wanted it without the need for the user to More >
49% of Small Business Owners Use Smartphones
Oct 22nd
At present we are seeing more smart phones being sold than actual computers. This will the inclusion of iPads and other such mobile devices such as laptops and bluetooth headsets old technolgies such as pagers are a distance memory.
According to a recent Foresters Survey of nearly 10,000 small business owners, it seems that a huge 49% of small business owners are reported to own smartphones. The stats break down like this:
35% – BlackBerrys 33% – iPhones 25% – Androids 7% – Windows Mobile devices.
The survey also interestingly shows that even though 82% of Americans own a phone, 50% have internet on their phones but only 17% actually have smartphones. It would seem at the moment most users are opting for a cheaper model.
Viewing A Mobile Phone Website Design Versus Viewing Website Designs On PC’s
Whichever way you look at it website design / Ecommerce Web Design needs to cater for this new wave of mobile digital experience. Viewing a website design on a computer is a completely different experience to viewing the same website on a mobile device, smartphone of no smartphone.
An average time spent viewing a website on a computer is between 3 – 4 minutes (depending on the website), whereas More >
Website Design / Blogging Platform Hits 100 Million Downloads
Oct 20th
Website Design / Blogging Platform Hits 100 Million Downloads
WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads last month, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads.
The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind:
We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins.
We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and the plugin directory. We’re going to focus on ensuring seamless upgrades by making the best possible determinations about compatibility, and offer continual improvements to More >
404 Error pages for your Website Design & Ecommerce Web Design Projects
Oct 17th
Hitting a dead end page is pretty disappointing, you search, your find and you click eagerly expecting to see what your looking for. To be shown a basic 404 error is pretty frustrating after all your hard work.
HTTP – 404 Page Not Found Sorry, the page you were looking for cannot be found.
What Are Website Design 404 Page Errors Most clients will not understand what a 404 page is will assume your website is down, you not finished the website or you or no longer trading. We have started to implement on both our Website Design and Ecommerce Web Design projects specific 404 page designs to make this annoying little aspect a bit more fun, and to reassure / help your clients to find what they are looking for.
When Do Website Design 404 Page Errors Happen? A 404 page error will appear when a browser tries to access a page that no longer exists on your website. This can happen a few ways. If you are thinking of a Website Redesign for instance, you may have 400 pages listed on Google and if you move your website platform to say WordPress which allows you to integrate a blog and social media much More >
Happy Clients
Oct 15th
Client Spec: WordPress Website Design
“I have been sending out the link you sent me to all our friends and acquaintances and work colleagues, and the response has been very positive. They all like the look of the site, so well done. We’re happy, too, with the way it’s turned out. I’m keen to learn how to ‘operate’ it so we can add things. Thanks again.”
Anne & Paul Pulati
WordPress – History of the Website Design Platform
Oct 13th
Due to the huge demand for social media integration and the importance blogs play with on-page search engine optimisation we use WordPress as a first choice platform for our website design and website redesign clients. Here is a little history about the platform.
WordPress History
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal website design publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is modern software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. WordPress believe that focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.
2001 – b2 cafelog launched by Michel Valdrighi.
2003 – Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little fork b2 and create WordPress.
2004 – Plugins are introduced with Version 1.2 (Mingus).
2005 – Theme system and static pages are introduced with Version 1.5 (Strayhorn), followed by persistent caching, a new user role system, and a new backend UI in Version 2.0 (Duke).
2007 – A new UI, autosave, spell check and other new features were introduced in Version 2.1 (Ella). Widgets, better Atom feed support, and speed optimizations came out More >
Great error pages
Sep 26th