Aug 19th, 2011

Shortly after we finished writing our recent post on the top 10 WordPress Plugins 2011, we came across this little plugin whilst working on a WordPress CMS project. It’s developed by a guy called Elliot Condon, and we found it to be so good that we had to dedicate an entire post to it.

The Advanced Custom Fields plugin is, in one word, brilliant. For anyone looking to extend the functionality flexibility of WordPress as a CMS, without using something as complicated as Pods CMS Framework, it’s perfect.

You can use it to pretty much replace the standard WP ‘Edit’ screen with whatever fields you want. It’s really simple to use, too. Once you’ve created your list of custom fields you then assign that ‘set’ to any number of templates, stick a few bits of code in your HTML, and you’re away!
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Aug 2nd, 2011

Last week we attended an evening dedicated to opening our minds and gathering some tips on mobile usability. The evening was free and hosted by Northern User Experience, and these are my thoughts…

The main talk was by Kimberley Bottomley, a User Experience Manager at Aviva who has “spent a considerable amount of time researching [mobile usability] and learning about [it] in the past 12 months”.

The talk got off to a bit of a slow start, detailing some points which any good designer or User Experience professional should take into consideration on every project, whether mobile or not. However there were several interesting facts and figures to spark discussion amongst the group.

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Jul 5th, 2011

It’ll come as no surprise to those who have been following the releases of this practical series by A Book Apart, that this is a really great little book. And by ‘little’ I mean exactly that. (It only took about 3 hours from start to finish, and I’m definitely not the world’s fastest reader!). But that’s by no means a reflection on the quality of the content.

Responsive Web Design is a very concise and to-the-point book on how to apply front end development techniques in order to make a single website adapt to be more easily viewed at multiple screen resolutions, and on multiple mobile and desktop platforms.

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Mar 31st, 2011

Facebook launched the new page layouts on the 10th of March to bring the ‘Pages’ design in line with Profile pages. The two biggest changes to note are that tabs have moved to left hand side, and there are now a selection of images across the top.

Static FBML is now being phased out in favour of Facebook Apps, which means you can build apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript using the Javascript SDK, or with PHP, CSS and Javascript using the PHP SDK. These files are hosted on your own server and then pulled into Facbook via an iFrame.

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Jun 30th, 2010

Now, this post was supposed to go out about two weeks ago, and since then it seems that every designer under the sun has written on the same subject – That’ll teach us for being lazy. Nonetheless, we decided to publish it anyway, just in case anyone missed any of the other great posts out there…

By now you should all have heard of the iPad, and if not then you must have been living under a rock for the last few months! Touch screen devices are here to stay and you need to start thinking about how to design and develop to get the most out of them. Apple would like you to believe that the iPad is the only touch screen device that anyone should own (and to be honest it probably is the best), but there are already some strong competitors, and many more coming to the market this year. So, you need to get your thinking caps on and start designing your websites to work with them, as well as updating your other sites, too. There are a lot of things to consider… here are just a few.

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Jun 11th, 2010

After tweeting yesterday that we didn’t have time to blog this week, it actually turns out that we do! So for those of you who haven’t noticed already, we have a brand new website! And I thought I’d tell you a little bit about it…

The decision to redesign wasn’t taken lightly. In my opinion there have to be strong reasons in order to make it worth while dedicating so much (unpaid) time to redesigning your website, and in our case I think there was. The original site was very simple, and quite popular! A lot of people seemed to like it, but in our opinion it just didn’t say as much about the company as we wanted. There weren’t enough images of our work, and from a clients perspective, there wasn’t enough information on how we approach our work and the way that we build our relationships.

Instead of spending a lot of time working this information into the current design, the decision was made to start from scratch as it wasn’t actually much more work!

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Mar 4th, 2010

We recently attended Speak the Web in Sheffield and Leeds and brought a lot of really useful information and ideas away with us. I attended the Leeds talk where Andy Clarke, a well respected designer, leader of web design studio Stuff and Nonsense, and CSS guru, presented a preview of his new publication “Hardboiled web design“.

The main theme around his talk (and something that we put into practice at What!?) is top-down web design and development.

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Feb 23rd, 2010

Ok, so there are a lot of articles out there on HTML5, especially since Google Wave arrived (because it’s the first major app to run on the language), but all the information that you need to know in order to start using it now is either too complicated, or spread out over various websites / articles / tutorials. Hopefully in this article we’ll be able to amalgamate and condense a lot of this information so that anyone with basic HTML knowledge can start using it.

Before I start I’d just like to say a big thank you to the Speak the Web guys who put a series of talks on in the north of England over the last two weeks. The gigs each had a speaker from Opera (amongst others) who enlightened many of us to the true potential of HTML5, and why we should start using it sooner rather than later.

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Feb 10th, 2010

The styling and formating of marketing emails is a fine art, but many people are missing a key factor with their design and build that may make or break the user’s decision to view the email in its entirety…

We are all familiar with an email dropping in our inbox and appearing as blank white space:

The above image is an example of emails not being designed and built to work with images disabled. To help with explaining this process I have built a quick email to illustrate how alt tags can be styled, cells coloured, and text positioned to produce a professional looking email before any images have been downloaded. By using these techniques the user will be given an impression of the message, and an incentive to turn on images and view your email in it’s entirety.

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Dec 8th, 2009

For a long time Flash has held the market when it comes to unique and interesting interactive experiences on the web. But now, with jQuery becoming ever more popular a shift has become evident, and for good reason too!

Flash is a very good tool and you can do some amazing things with it, however, some of the fundamental aspects of web design and development are drastically improved when using jQuery.

jQuery is a free open source JavaScript library that has been designed to aid interaction on the Web. With the help of frameworks such as MooTools and Prototype, it has become very easy for simple JavaScript animations to be implemented with ease, and without any dreaded browser cross-compatibility issues.

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