22 January 2015
More than a third of website visitors used a mobile or tablet device in 2014. Usage was split fairly evenly between tablet and mobile (although tablet was a little higher).
26 September 2014
One of the things I’m often asked is “what is a domain name” (often usually about the same time as “what is web hosting”). So I thought I’d just include a short overview (and next time I’ll write a short overview of hosting).
Put simply a domain name is your address on the World Wide Web.
28 August 2014
Since earlier this year I’ve decided to specialise in using Perch as the CMS when building websites. There may be some rare times when it isn’t the best fit and I’ll use something else but those are very rare.
One of the main reasons I like working with Perch is because it’s designed for working with highly structured content. Unlike most CMSs it doesn’t just give you a big white box and say “feed me all your content”. It breaks down each page into elements and lets you edit those elements independently.
30 July 2014
With the rise of mobile devices and tablets many websites are now responsive. A single website responds to the device it’s being viewed on and changes the layout. There is usually no longer a need for a separate mobile website in most cases.
But if not done well this can cause problems. If your site has a huge hero image on the front page, does it need to be downloaded by someone on a mobile device? What it they’re away from home in another country paying for expensive data?
We need to adapt the content without changing it.
27 June 2014
When I design a website I always start with designing the content. That means looking at what content we need (and if there’s an existing site what we don’t need) and then creating the content.
Many people think that the design of a Web site’s layout comes first and the content just gets dropped into it. This is how cheap websites are often created, there is no connection between the content and the layout.
27 May 2014
The future for any CMS beyond the most simple website is to have structured content and WordPress just wasn’t ever designed for structured content, it was designed for simple blog posts.
30 April 2014
The move to responsive web design has made a lot of changes to the process of designing web sites. I don’t have the answer yet but I thought I’d share my thoughts and maybe together we can all get closer to something that works.
04 March 2014
One of the most important parts of a successful website design or redesign is user research. It’s something that is often overlooked though, usually due to budget. Without it though you could be wasting whatever budget you do spend.
Any good web designer will include user research as part of the website creation process.
04 February 2014
Meta tags are part of the code of Web pages. People visiting your Web page don’t see them but search engines do.
Although the description doesn’t directly affect your search engine ranking they do improve your chance of a visitor clicking through to your page from the search engine results page.
07 January 2014
I recently had an email from someone asking about adding keywords to their site. They’d been advised to add keywords to their meta tags.
While this was good intentioned advice, it’s not actually good advice.