29/11/2016New Site Launched for the Latin Mass Society
We are very proud to announce the launch of a brand new site for the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales. It's been a complete rethink of the site, completely restructuring all of their site contents and creating a new, modern look and feel.
The new website includes
A fully featured membership… Read More
26/08/2016If Web Design was Photography is Social Media the Talkies?
When Henry Fox Talbot started his photography experiments in 1835 just down the road from here at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, he had no idea of where it would eventually lead. This image is credited as being the first ever photograph, Pikachu was not in the original.
When I was a student we were given an essay to do based on a quote that "from today painting is dead"... Which wikipedia tells me is from Paul Delaroche after seeing a daguerreotype, one of the earliest forms of photography. It's a very forward thinking approach… Read More
04/05/2016CiviCRM Drupal - Transfer to New Server
CiviCRM Drupal is a winning combination for charity web design, but they can be very fussy and demanding about how they are set up. Foreign key checks on database tables make it difficult to manage backups and site migrations for a CiviCRM data site in the way you would normally handle a Drupal website - but it can be done.
This recipe works for setting up a new development version - or copying data to a new server. CiviCRM is very fragile and needy when it comes to database tables… Read More
11/04/2016Don't be the Next Victims of a Data Leak
If we had built the Mossack Fonseca website, they wouldn't be in this mess! Reading about the Panama papers I spotted that the information originates from a compromised mail server. Somebody got admin access to the mail server, which then allowed them to download all emails sent through the company and all emails sitting in user's mail boxes. That's a lot of data - 2.6 terrabytes in total - and a lot of information which really should have been better secured. So, how did the whistle blower get the data? The company deals with… Read More22/03/2016
Commerce Kickstart - How to Get Rid of Git Submodules
If you wish to remove the submodules, you can do so with the commands
git rm --cached profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider git rm --cached profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_expander git rm --cached profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery_ui_spinner git rm --cached profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/selectnav.js Once you've done this commit and push your code and you should be able to deploy once more.If you still have problems, try this:
$ git rm -r ProjectName --cached $ git… Read More
16/03/201616 of the Best Modules for Drupal 7
As a follow up to our previous article - 12 Modules You Need to Know About - we've been asked about top Drupal modules which are essential to any web design and development project.
So, here is a list of the best modules for Drupal 7 that we routinely add to every project we set up. I haven't included drupal modules such as Ctools or Entity in this list… Read More
03/03/2016Design for Ed Sheeran's First Web Site
We built Ed Sheeran's first website - so I guess you could say we were partly responsible for his huge success :o)
Great Design & E-commerceElements of the design we did back in 2007 are still in use today. This layout isn't actually what we ended up going live with, but it gives you some idea of where we were going. The finished site even had an e-commerce element, but I don't remember what we were selling - Cd's and mp3's I guess.
Doesn't he look young?
09/02/201612 Drupal Modules That You Need To Know About
Drupal is an open source modular web development system, there are lots of modules out there but they are not all as good as they might seem. Over the years we have researched and tested hundreds of modules for different tasks, here are some of our favourites for Drupal 7.
1. Backup and Migratehttps://www.drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
This is probably one you already know about, but if you… Read More
22/01/20165 Ways to Make Your Drupal Website Faster
Drupal websites can benefit from a little bit of care and attention to fine tune their performance. Here are some tips for how to speed up your page loads.
Advagg - advanced aggregation This is a massively powerful module which manages all of the css and javascript generated by the many and varied elements of your website. It combines these into small compressed files which speed up your page load - and can also move blocking items to the footer to improve the speed… Read More
04/12/2015Why you should be resizing images for your website
It is very important to resize your images before uploading to your website, mainly to save you lots of time.
Back in the days before Content Management Systems (CMS) we used to hard code all the text and images on a web page. We had control over the quality and file size of the images we used. These days the content on most websites is managed by the business owner which can sometimes be tricky especially where images are concerned!
Photos taken with modern digital cameras can be anything up to 20MB+ depending on your camera… Read More
03/12/2015Site Launch - M&B Surfaces
Our latest website launch is for M&B Surfaces, one of our long-standing clients. M&B provide garden and play surfacing products and services (and much more besides) to both the trade sector and retail customers. Earlier this year we made a new website for the retail side of the business playbark.com, an ecommerce website. The M&B website is a brochure and catalogue site to showcase their trade-only offering - so there are no online sales. Customers… Read More
23/11/2015A Brief History of Web Page Design and Build
When I started making web sites way back in 1996, the internet was a very different place and web sites were very different beasts. It's hard now to imagine that large sites were made of flat HTML files- but that is all there was! Since then, the technology and I have both come a long way, first databases, then CMSs, it's very hard to guess what the next step will be.
My First Web DesignThe first web page I ever made was reverse engineered from a page on the AOL site. It was 1996 or maybe 97, and I wanted to make… Read More