Web Design

I have always been a fan of the BBC website. It is extremely effective at organising and presenting vast quantities of information. When I visited the BBC homepage last week, I thought I must have mis-typed the URL. It was not the usual BBC website that I know and love. When I realised that it was indeed the BBC homepage, I was shocked, surprised and I immediately closed the browser window. I went back a few times over the next few days so that I could slowly absorb it. I thought, well, all good things change, and maybe I will grow to love the new design.

Displaying random images on a home page can add real impact. It ensures that your home page is always fresh, because when a visitor returns to the home page, a new image will appear.

Here are a few examples of random images in action. When you visit the home page on these sites, keep clicking refresh and you will see that the main image changes.

Google has developed a product that small business can use to add search functionality to a website. Many websites that do not use content management systems do not have search functionality, so users cannot search the content on these websites. Because Google is crawling the web anyway, website owners can tap into their results.

Pay for web developers in the UK has jumped 26% in the past 12 months and is reaching levels of the dotcom boom in the 90's, according to a report in The Guardian and on the BBC this morning. The rise is due to a combination of increased demand and not enough supply of web developers.

A photo speaks a thousand words

In a web world where content (text/words) is king, web masters often ignore photographs on web pages because all they are thinking about is content for search engines. And that means text and lots of it. The result is an Internet full of text heavy sites.

Working to a deadline can make you work more effectively and get the job done a lot quicker. But does this hold true for web programming? If you are a journalist, you will be used to deadlines. It is possible to write a story quickly with the added pressure of a deadline. Similarly, tasks like mowing the law or vacuuming the house can be done quickly if you set yourself a deadline. But I have found with web programming, a tight deadline can be very counter-productive.

Developing a legal contract to bind the agreement between a web designer or developer and its clients can be a very expensive and time consuming exercise.

Thankfully the kind folk at Media Surgery have gone through the expense for you and put together a legal agreement that a freelance (or agency) web designer, developer or search engine optimiser can use.

Favicon has become very popular in the past few years and is an important part of enhancing the branding of your website.

What is Favicon.ico?

A Favicon is the icon at the beginning of the URL bar in your browser. It is also visible in the favourites list when your site is bookmarked by a visitor (although, not all browsers support this). Favicon is an acronym for Favourites Icon

I used to love this saying in business meetings. A bunch of us would be sitting around discussing something like a new sales process. With every contribution to the discussion, the process became ever more complex. And then someone would say "keep it simple stupid", or KISS for short. We would all suddenly realise that we were over complicating the process and that would lead to its downfall.

People who have never designed a website before normally have no idea what the process is. Even people who do design and develop sites for a hobby or living, do not know the best practices. I have been guilty of this myself. I get an idea in my head and jump straight into coding the site. There is no surprise that the site does not look or function correctly.