Web Design & Development Articles
Insights and advice to help you keep up with the increasingly fast pace of change in web design, brand design and social & digital media marketing.
Grow Your Sales Year on Year
The internet is littered with thousands of failed websites and e-commerce websites. Few people realise how easy it is to make a website - but how difficult it is to make a successful e-commerce website.
Our e-commerce websites generate year on year growth in sales and revenue. In terms of volume we have sold many millions of pounds worth of goods through our e-commerce websites.
We design and program E-commerce websites with the ability to expand as… Read More
What Makes a Turtlereality Website So Good?
Here at Turtlereality, we aren't great at blowing our own trumpets. We believe in working diligently to provide a great service to our customers - but we would like to share with you what it is that sets us apart from other web design companies. Here is a quick summary:
Attention to detail Design - flair and effectiveness Quality assurance - we test things - and fix them Optimisation - pages load blazingly fast We understand mobile - our designs work for all screen sizes Great photography - we get the most out of even poor source… Read More
E-commerce for Charity Website OUCH(uk)
As part of a major overhaul and redesign of their website, we have just opened a new e-commerce element for OUCH(uk) the UK national cluster headache charity.
The e-commerce elements are linked to the charity's backend CiviCRM database to tie up all the information about purchases, donations, and memberships.
Hopefully, this will further help the charity to prosper with a new revenue stream.
Best Modules for Drupal 8
Following our article 16 of the best Drupal 7 Modules, here is an up-to-the minute list of the best Drupal 8 modules. These are the ones we know will be vital on nearly any web design and development project.
Best Modules for Drupal 8 Admin ToolbarReplacing our old favourite 'admin menu' this module along with the Adminimal theme and the 'adminimal toolbar' module are a pleasure to work… Read More
Site Launch: The Swim School
We've just launched another site for a thriving Wiltshire business. This is a Drupal 8 site for a Westbury-based company offering swimming classes with locations across the north and south of England.
Migrating Turtlereality from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
Over the Summer we've been busy behind the scenes upgrading turtlereality.com from Drupal 7 state to Drupal 8 - and it's been an interesting and enlightening process!
The Drupal migration system is not quite in its finished state, but it's useable enough for simple sites without too many complex data types or data display scenarios. The turtlereality.com site is fairly simple - compared to most of the sites we build for clients - there are a few data types and only a handful of different display types, which currently have to be… Read More
GDPR - A new Era for Data
The great GDPR rush is now, more or less, over. The email torrent reduces to a trickle and we have a chance to reflect on what it all means!
Last weekend I spent a number of hours dismantling the 30 or so hard drives that I've had stashed in a box in the office. These represent all of the computer upgrades that I've done since I started building PCs from components in about 1994(ish). Every obsolete hard disk was saved rather than binned because I couldn't quite figure out what to do with them - and so a huge store of data mounted up… Read More
Git submodules, Composer and DeployHQ
After enormous amounts of frustration, I've finally worked out a recipe for setting up Drupal development websites working with composer, git and deployHQ - the submodules were the fly in the ointment, here is how to work with them.
First, create a new Drupal web development project using composer
>$ composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:8.x-dev my_site_name_dir --stability dev --no-interaction
Next, rename web to public_html - so it plays nicely with… Read More
Drupalgeddon 2 Averted - or How we Patched Everything in 2 Hours
Last week we had advanced warning of a critical security update to Drupal core versions 6, 7 and 8. The message was that we should do these updates immediately as a remotely exploitable hole was being fixed.
The patches were due for release at 7pm GMT and we waited with developers across the world as the Drupal site crashed briefly. By 8pm we had the new code and by 10pm all of our sites were either patched with the short term fix supplied by Drupal or updated to the new secure release.
The whole process was handled very… Read More
