Web Design & Development

The visual equivalent of a call to action, buttons are becoming increasingly popular on websites as the quickest and easiest way to convert potential clients’ interest. Whether it’s subscribe, buy, follow or friend, there are buttons for all actions and they provide a clear, simple visual indicator of how your visitor can achieve their (and your) aim. [Read On]

Images are one of the most important, and trickiest, elements of web design. They are necessary to aid consumer engagement and create visual interest across a page, but they are indexed in very different ways to text. Until recently, overusing images on a site could negatively impact on its ranking, taking away essential space for robot-attracting content; however, all this has changed with the advent of Google Images, which has given pictorial content a place in SEO. [Read On]

Search Engine Optimisation is largely to do with the content of a website. It is here that you need to insert keywords, create meta-tags and ensure the right level of density and quality to attract higher rankings. That doesn’t mean, however, that SEO is unrelated to web design. On the contrary, a well-designed website can aid in gaining stronger rankings and every website design needs to be influenced by a working knowledge of SEO. [Read On]

If you are looking to design a website, one of the first questions you’ll need to address is which programming language is best suited to your needs. Each language has its own benefits and will therefore suit different types of websites. [Read On]

Your website is the online "shop front" for your business and, just like a physical shop, you have to make it as easy as possible for your customers to browse and buy. This is true regardless of whether you're selling products directly through your website, or prompting your visitors to enquire about your services. [Read On]

When attempting to extract user data from Active Directory or some other LDAP server you need to have the full account details (username and password) of a user with read (and write if making updates) access to the server for the record(s) you want to retrieve. This would be supplied by a network admin or similar. [Read On]

There are occasions when allowing search engine robots access to pages on your site can do more harm than good. Although Google and the other engines are very good at correctly detecting and disregarding duplicate content, it's wise to pay special attention to which pages on your site might cause the problem and put measures in place to prevent it. [Read On]

As part of their recently announced Open Graph Protocol, Facebook launched a number of new plugins to make integrating with their site easier. Probably the most important of these is the new 'like' button. This simple to add snippet of code allows a user to quickly 'vote' on the current page and see which of their Facebook friends have already voted. You can try it at the bottom of this post. [Read On]

After searching long and hard for a component that would enable us to display the latest post from a WordPress blog on the homepage of a Joolma driven website we decided to develop our own. There was nothing freely available and the few 'paid for' solutions where hugely over complicated for what we needed. [Read On]