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 What might have been the hottest trend in web design last year, might be considered out of date by the following year.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 ...
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...
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...
By Ollie Reardon 25th May 2017
To help search engines such as Google or Duckduckgo to get a better understanding of the content you have displayed on your website, you can use “Structured Data”. Structured Data is a list of details about the web page, that isn’t rendered on the actual page for users to see, but can be picked up by search engines, such as Google, to provide them a better understanding of the information displayed for the end user. What is Structured Da...
By Ollie Reardon 28th March 2017
Ever visited an online ecommerce store but left without purchasing due to getting frustrated with navigating around the website? Maybe the website is missing some essential features such as no option to pay via PayPal, Bitcoin or other favoured methods of payment? Here is a list of some of the most important must-have features to have on any ecommerce website: Mobile Friendly Design Like any other website, having a mobile friendly web design...
By Ollie Reardon 21st November 2016
As Bootstrap 4 introduced some new welcomed features, it also has made some refinements to previous Bootstrap components. Base font size change To improve readability the base font size in Bootstrap 3, ~14px, has been bumped up to ~16px. Dropped support To help reduce page bloat and to aid Bootstrap maintainers with the codebase, there have been several components that have been dropped from Bootstrap 4 LESS SASS is the pre-proc...
By Ollie Reardon 28th October 2016
While Bootstrap 4 has polished up on the features of the previous major release, Bootstrap 3, several new features have been introduced to keep Bootstrap a solid, modern front-end web framework. XL Columns There is a new column breakpoint introduced in Bootstrap 4, Extra Large! Currently the Bootstrap 4 columns are as follows: Size Pixels Extra Small (col-xs) <576px Small (col-sm) >576px Medium (col-md) >768px Large (col-lg) >9...
By Ollie Reardon 25th February 2016
At the end of 2014, Google reinvented the way website developers can combat against pesky spam bots on the web. Introducing Google ReCaptcha, a simple way to prove that you are a human reading the website. If you are a frequent Internet user, you may have seen previous methods of proving you are not a spam bot like the one pictured above. These have many problems - not only is the text hard to read (resulting in having to retry multiple ti...
By Ollie Reardon 5th February 2016
In order to whitelist a website in Purify, the ad blocker for iOS Safari, you need to first access a webpage on the website you want to whitelist, then press the middle "share" button at the bottom of the app window. From there, scroll right on the bottom panel and ensure that the "Purify Actions" button is present. If it isn't then tap the "More" button. A new window will now appear and you will need to check that the toggle beside "Purify...
By Ollie Reardon 7th October 2015
Upfront Mini is a front-end web developer conference which was hosted in the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. The conference consisted of 8 speakers that discussed a variety of subjects including git, mobile testing and using WebRTC. The schedule for the day was as follows: Applying Leadership Thinking to UX by Lily Dart Using Polymer, today by Sam Beckham Git - Beyond the Basics by Emma Jane Westby Exploring Design...
By Ollie Reardon 2nd July 2014
Here at Rapid Web Services, I occasionally take on the somewhat daunting task of templating email designs. The issue with email designs is that there are no real standards when compared to the push that modern browser vendors are making to make HTML and CSS consistent no matter what web browser the end user is using. This is obviously an issue as a developer as there is no real “one size fits all” approach to templating email designs. Luckil...
By Ollie Reardon 27th May 2014
At the start of May, I had the fantastic opportunity to attend the 2014 net awards, hosted at the Grand Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden, London as one of my friends went to represent Sublime Text who were nominated and won an award for "App of the Year". The awards were packed full of famous faces from the web world as there were plenty of fantastic web projects up for different awards. Here's our team's top picks of the projects seen at the ...