Alan had a very strong idea of what he wanted from the outset, “the photography must take centre stage”… So we took this idea and ran with it.

Alan has a huge collection of scanned photographs, all of which were in different formats, sizes and aspect ratios. Our first challenge was to create a website design that was entirely led by these photographs, and yet was still easy to navigate and something that would work on the smallest smartphone, right up to the highest resolution display possible. The answer was to make the site a fullscreen gallery of his work.

The beauty of making the photography fullscreen, is it really immerses you into the work, however it does have it’s downsides. The first technical pitfall was choosing an aspect ratio that would work across different browser shapes and sizes with the least crop. Once we settled on the ratio, we then needed to choose a common size. Due to the introduction of Apple’s high resolution Retina displays, the images had to be very large, but we discovered that large images with high compression rendered very well on all displays, and the artefacting associated with heavily compressed JPEG images is far less noticeable when the image was around 1500 pixels wide.

Although the website was to be photography focussed, we also needed to bring in many of his written pieces, including behind-the-scenes making of essays as well as his other writings. We really wanted to keep the fullsize background themes so presented the idea of a choosing images that sat nicely around a defined text block.

Alan is a big user of his iPad and was keen to make the website look and work just as well on the iPad’s portrait or landscape views, as well as it did on his main computer. The website was built with media queries to dynamically adapt the type size, menu positioning, and many other aspects of the visual layout on the fly.

1000 photographs, 100s of cartoons and quotes and 30 essays, later, may we present:

alanparker.com

We are delighted to report that Alan is as happy with his website as we are. Thanks to our highly customised WordPress backend, the entirety of the website is editable by Alan himself. Over the last few weeks he has been fixing typos in the essays, adding new photographs and tweaking quotes.  In fact, Alan has probably done more tweaks to the website than all of us here!

It turns out there are some marked improvements on how the new WordPress version will look, and indeed, function.

Media

Firstly there has been a big clean-up of the media area and how media is handled in general. This is a big step, as one of the main gripes we get is with finding and managing images, and media uploading to a websites.

The dashboard

There has been talk of vastly reducing the complexity of the dashboard UI, making it far simpler to navigate and easier use. There have been other changes within the admin also, including the introduction of a new colour picker, new welcome screen and a further 100+ changes to the underlying system.

And lastly, no more links manager

That’s right, the rarely used links tool will now be dropped. This may be an issue for a few of our client sites, who use this area to categorise outbound links. These are often displayed on a “links” page using a shortcode widget that formats them nicely on the page. The good news is this will still be available as a plug-in.

Jodi joins us as a senior developer and WordPress expert with many years experience in developing fantastic, functional and stylish websites. Jodi brings with him a plethora of experience, not only in web development, but also as a professional photographer, and has a good eye for design. He also has a hat that makes him look like a badger.

We are very happy to announce the launch of a new website for Women’s Breakout, a charity dedicated to providing alternative options to custody, for women offenders.

Women’s Breakout approached us after seeing our work with another women’s charity and one of their members, Platform 51. They were seeking to improve their existing site on a number of levels, specifically requiring:

• An easy to use content management system
• A secure documents/resource area for member organisations
• A members directory with Google Maps integration
• A system to list upcoming events and meetings
• A website that was more visually interesting and that presented some of the women they work with.

They have been very happy with the result. Jackie Russell, the Director of Women’s Breakout had this to say:

I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you and your team on your work for Women’s Breakout. The website is fantastic, we are getting some really good feedback on it from members and stakeholders, and I’m sure it will help us enormously in getting our message out and helping vulnerable women. The support has also been excellent – and I hope that will continue a little longer as we get used to the site.

The website can be found here:

http://www.womensbreakout.org.uk/

We have been testing them for a few months now and have been waiting for the technology to become reliable. It seems that we have now resolved all quirks and are even able to do some pretty nifty things like; direct dial numbers, call forwarding, conference calls, transferring calls and most importantly remote working.

You can still contact us on the old number: 0845 838 0850

But you are much better off dialling directly:

020 34 22 66 77

As you are probably aware, your website is now breaking the law.

The new law, imposed this month requires all websites to gain explicit consent before storing cookies on users’ computers. This covers any script on your site that stores cookies on the client machine, be it Google Analytics, persistent logins and anything else that is not “strictly necessary” to the function of the website.

In order to comply you must:

• Audit your cookies and present clear information about them on your privacy policy
• Include some mechanism to gain consent before any cookies are stored
• After the your scripts to prevent it storing cookies before consent is given

Clearly this is quite time consuming and many “anti-cookie-policy lobbyists” would suggest you simply ignore the law, as it would be quite impossible to fine everybody with a website.

What should you do?

Our approach is simple.

We are giving the option to our customers.

If you wish we are able to undertake a full cookie audit and put in place the consent scripts. We have a number of tools and scripts available to make this process fairly painless. We have great experience in doing so and can get your website compliant within a few hours.

The other option is simply to ignore the law altogether – and we fully support this option too.

The first step was to choose a name that encompassed the services provided, but also worked well for SEO.

We spent some time analysing competitor websites to gauge the approach they were taking in communicating their services to potential clients. We felt that the sites were very wordy and in most cases quite dull. Most of the sites were over serious and we wanted to add a bit of fun. Having worked with nice full-screen-background sites recently we decided to apply this style to Ocean Marine Surveys, hoping the the visual impact of the background photography could be balanced with clear, clean and minimalist design.

Our initial approach was to design a brand icon that could be used across differing media, we decided that a small model boat would be ideal as it would provide a grounding visual element to the brand and website, be descriptive of the service and add this element of “fun”. The toy boat was an object many boat owners may have had historical contact with, and even could have driven their interest of sailing. Alas the boat ended up being quite technical in nature and was a little too detailed to effectively be used in a brand.

Our next step driven by Ian was to incorporate a seabird. The grey tipped gull was chosen for it’s keen eye and it’s connection with both sea and shore. The webdesign used this element to break out of the otherwise rigid grid, and provides great visual interest whilst linking background photography to the foreground copy.

You can visit the site here:

http://www.oceanmarinesurveys.co.uk

Using the striking lime green of the brand as a highlight colour, combined with simple yet effective icons we were able to improve on the overall impact of the site. We have retained many of the existing brand features such as the pin striping in the blue areas and the use of subtle gradients, but by adding subtle shadows and cleaner typefaces, the site now feels more professional, established and modern.

You can vist the website here: www.mxcs.co.uk

A while back we discussed how to improve the readability of screen fonts in Windows XP – but we have recently discovered many of our clients running Windows Vista are also affected.

The process of switching on ClearType is actually relatively painless. Just follow the steps below:

1. Right click on an empty part of your desktop.
2. From the drop-down menu that appears, Click Personalise.
3. In the Personalise window, Click the Windows Colour and Appearance option.
4. In the colour and appearance window, Click the open classic appearance properties.
5. In the classic appearance properties window, Press the Effects button.
6. A small effects window will now appear.
7. Under the use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts section you will see an option box.
8. Click the arrow to the Right of the box and select “cleartype“
9. Next click OK followed by OK again to close the classic appearance setting window.
10. Finally Close the personalisation window.

You will now notice just how much smoother and clearer type appears on screen.