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10 things the homepage of your website must succeed at

By Tim Lees 21st March 2018


The front page of a website is more often than not the single most important page when it comes to your website.  The homepage has a difficult job as it needs to do many different jobs; it often draws the most traffic of any single page on your website and to a first time visitor it is usually the first page that is seen so the homepage has to act as a shop window to your service or products, inviting users to convert in the guise of either sign...

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What is caching?

By Kirsty Gasston 13th March 2018


At some point during your website's development or maintenance, your web developer(s) are bound to mention caching to you, and will likely stress how important it is for your website's speed and optimisation. But what is caching exactly and why is it so important? Caching basics First, you need to understand the basics - when you load a webpage in your web browser, the browser must download the required files to display that page. This includes...

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6 signs that your website needs updating

By Ollie Reardon 23rd February 2018


The web moves rapidly. What might have been the hottest trend in web design last year, might be considered out of date by the following year. Therefore, you need to ensure that you are updating your website's look and content regularly. You will never be able to launch a website and then never do any updating again. These are some of the most common signs of an old website. 1. Non-mobile friendly web design One of the most important factors of ...

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Get Country Code in PHP, with PHP Countries

By Jordan Hall 14th February 2018


Country information is used so frequently in modern web development. This is especially true in customer relationship managements systems and e-commerce websites. Since we do a lot of e-commerce and CRM development here at Rapid Web Services, we developed an open source library to easily retrieve country information. The rest of this post will detail how you can use this library, PHP Countries, and what it is capable of. Installation To inst...

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10 tips to reduce basket and checkout abandonment on your eCommerce website

By Tim Lees 5th February 2018


The shopping checkout process is arguably the most important part of an eCommerce website. Get the process wrong and you'll potentially be left with frustrated users who may abandon your website and go elsewhere. Get the process right and the customer should have the confidence and reassurance about the purchase they have just made. Here's our top 10 tips to reduce basket and checkout abandonment on your eCommerce website: 1. Simple checkout...

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Permissions Editor for Ninja Forms

By Andrew McDonald 29th January 2018


Ever wanted to add a form to your WordPress site? A basic requirement of almost all websites, no matter their purpose, is a contact form that enables customers or potential customers to complete a few basic fields to send an enquiry through. Sometimes you will also need more complex forms that request multiple types of data from a user. If you have ever wanted to create a custom form on a WordPress site you will know that there are a lot of p...

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Doing more with Advanced Custom Fields

By Ollie Reardon 17th November 2017


A few months ago, we covered the basics of Advanced Custom Fields, a powerful plugin for WordPress that enables you to expand the basic content editing fields supplied by default by WordPress website to display content on your website. Going Pro In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the more advanced features of Advanced Custom Fields. While Advanced Custom Fields offers a free plugin, there is also a Pro version which offers extended fu...

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Get UK Bank Holidays in PHP

By Jordan Hall 3rd November 2017


If you've ever needed to display opening times for a business on their website you'll probably have encountered the edge case of differing opening times on UK Bank Holidays. The UK government provides information regarding all UK Bank Holidays, and we've written a small open-source PHP library to take advantage of this. Installation You can install the PHP UK Bank Holidays package using Composer. If you've never used Composer before, you can fi...

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A few great features of Figma

By Tim Lees 16th October 2017


Figma is a vector based design tool that allows the user to rapidly design and deploy concepts for applications and websites. Listed below are some features that make Figma an indispensible tool. Browser based A really great thing about Figma is that the software is designed to be used in the browser allowing multiple users to work collaboratively on a design. This means that editing is instant and can be reviewed in real time. Whereas with tradi...

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Updating Laravel from v5.1 to v5.5

By Andrew McDonald 12th October 2017


So the new long-term support version of Laravel has been released taking us from the last long-term support version v5.1 to v5.5 with all the improvements that brings, however while there is plenty of guides around for upgrading from v5.4 to v5.5 there are none for upgrading from v5.1 straight to v5.5 unless you painstakingly upgrade to every version in between. But don't worry I have already been doing the upgrades to our current projects in ho...

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WordPress plugins for a successful CMS

By Kirsty Gasston 4th October 2017


WordPress has always been a very powerful blogging platform, but for website developers and those looking to update and add to their website on a regular basis, it can also be used as a very powerful content management system (CMS), with the implementation of the right plugins. Here's a summary of the plugins that we consider to be crucial in the setup of a website that will be using WordPress as a full CMS. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) As web ...

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How fast do you think your website should load?

By Ollie Reardon 15th September 2017


They don’t call us Rapid Web Services for nothing. We strive to ensure that we develop websites to perform as fast as possible. Why? Because did you know that you subconsciously move away from a website if it doesn’t load within the first few seconds. That’s not the only reason. Google use site performance to help decide where a site should appear in their search rankings. Focusing on site performance is especially crucial now that we ar...

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