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.

The tool is free to use, and although has a very small potential audience, is already proving very useful in this office.

You can see the tool here:

wattbike2garmin.com

The website brand employs the Octavian Roman typeface, the designer of which, David Kindersley, lived in the Hatley Park locality.

The website was to retain the class of the typeface, whilst appealing to those looking for office space and short term leased cottages. Being within a 45 minutes of Luton and Stansted airports, and 2 hours from Gatwick, Heathrow and Birmingham airports the location was to be promoted as an ideal base. The site was also to highlight the conservation assets of the estate.

The location is very much in the middle of the countryside. With ancient woodlands, wildflower meadows, ponds, lakes and wetlands right on the doorstep. If we were going to relocate, this would be our ideal!

You can view the website at: http://www.hatleyparkestate.co.uk/

All of the site links, img src tags, stylesheets and essentially every other object used in the site build, will be directly pathed to (will still point at) the old domain.

The simple answer is to either manually change these settings within the interface and reupload the images. This is very inefficient and not necesary, these URLs can be amended directly within the WordPress database. Correcting these errors manually, however, can be time consuming.

This is the bit where we tell you that we have a faster solution. You simply need to run these four queries against your WordPress database. Remember to replace “olddomain.com” and “newdomain.com” with your existing and new domains.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content =
REPLACE(post_content,'www.olddomain.com','www.newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid =
REPLACE(guid,'www.olddomain.com','www.newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value =
REPLACE(meta_value,'www.olddomain.com','www.newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value =
REPLACE(option_value,'www.olddomain.com','www.newdomain.com');

There are many things that can affect the security of WordPress sites, we have recently experienced a hack attempt at one of our .gov.uk domains. The hack was simply to write a file to the /wp-config/ folder, which happened to be file mode 777 (public writable). In the newest version of WordPress, only one folder needs global write permissions - /wp-content/uploads/.

Fixing this vulnerability is a simple matter of changing the folder permissions of all folders in your WordPress install to mode 755.

find [your path here] -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

As for the /wp-content/uploads/ folder – you simply need to set the permissions back to 777 and create an .htaccess file with the following content:

<FilesMatch "\.(php|html|htm|js)">
  Order allow,deny
</FilesMatch>

This will deny access to any uploaded scripts or pages (.php/.html/.htm/.js) minimising the risk of a successful hack.

Other important factors to keep your site safe and sound:

• Keep your password secure
  WordPress can tell you if your password is a strong one, but cannot tell you if it contains dictionary words. Try to make this a mix of numbers and letters.
• Keep WordPress and its plug-ins up to date
  This may sound obvious, but as soon as a vulnerability is found in one plug-in, news spreads fast and your site is at risk. Most plug-in developers will release new versions of their plug-ins once the security hole is found. Keep them updated!
• Make sure you are hosting on a secure server
  You may have a friend down the pub who has a web server, but does he really know how to keep this secure? Find a reputable hosting company to house your website.
• Lastly – KEEP REGULAR BACKUPS!
  It may sound obvious, but having a rollback point of your site files and database is the best way to recover from a hack.

More information and further tips can be found here on the WordPress website:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

Which browser are you using?

It sounds like a simple request, and most people know if it’s Safari or Internet Explorer or Firefox, but not always. Also the version number is rarely known, and the process of describing how to find out this information can be tricky, especially over the phone.

We were looking for a simple page to send clients to in order to gain this information. This is what we built

We had a nice new brand to work with on this site, and the theme was to be fairly technical whilst retaining the friendly aspect of the brand. Blue Fox commissioned a photographer to take shots of the day to day workings of the company, giving access to a plethora of images. This helped a great deal with the design, as we could simply let the photography tell the story.

Our custom WordPress theme allows for large auto-resized header photography and section specific colour scheme.  The homepage selects the images used on the main sections and presents these in a fading presentation. All of this was built from the ground up using some fairly advanced WordPress code and the jQuery JavaScript library.

You can see the site at: http://www.bluefoxsystems.co.uk

The brief was to build a site that mimics the clean white and green style of the Sage brand, whilst retaining its own identity. We decided to use clear glass-like areas and the brand colours in a liquid-like flow representing the transaction flow within financial software.

You can see the site at: accstar.com

UPDATE: Feb 2012 – unfortunately the website is no longer live.

Pakenham Partners were very keen to get a new site online as quick as possible. Rising to the challenge we  turned around in just under two days, from initial sketches to the live working site.  We hope you like it.
http://www.pakenhampartners.com/