By Kirsty Gasston 1st April 2015
If you're having a new website built, are adding pages to your existing website or just updating the content on the site, you need to think carefully about the approach you take to writing the content. Before you get started, take a step back and make sure that you've thought about these basics. Web users won't read your content So, probably not want you want to hear when you're setting out to write your website content, but you need to accept th...
By Matt Fennell 26th February 2015
All throughout University, and in my career as a web designer, the desktop design has come first. I’ve learned how to design for desktops, creating pixel-perfect Photoshop PSDs which look perfect for clients, but this is changing. Since 2014 there are now more mobile users than desktop users, with roughly 2 billion of us reaching for our smartphones or tablets when wanting to access the internet. These statistics have caused web designer...
By Mark Jones 18th February 2015
During the course of this series we will look into the following coding methods/principles: Dependency Injection Coding to an Interface Inversion of Control Automatic Resolution I will explain what each one means, why we should use them, and how to implement each one. Dependency injection, coding to an interface, and inversion of control work well together so I will discuss those three first, and by the end of it, I will give you a full co...
By Jordan Hall 9th February 2015
I recently gave a presentation at Rapid Web Services regarding Git. It covers the background of Git, how it works internally, and some examples of daily use. The presentation also covers commonly used Git terminology and provides a frequently used command reference. 'The Fundamentals of Git' presentation is embedded below. Comments and constructive feedback are definitely welcome. This presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribut...
By Jordan Hall 17th December 2014
Security warnings in modern web browsers are weird. When you browse to your favourite online shopping checkout or your online bank account, you get a happy lock icon. That's great. It reminds users they are on a secure webpage, that...
By Mark Jones 10th December 2014
In this first article of the series, we will look at some very simple ways to refactor your code. So what is Refactoring? Refactoring is simply a set of techniques, procedures and steps to keep your source code as clean as possible. Below describes some of the easier code smells to detect and how you can go about refactoring them. Duplicated Code (Extract Method Refactoring) This is probably the easiest code smell to detect, and also refactor. ...
By Jordan Hall 17th October 2014
With all Turing complete programming languages, there are many different ways of performing the same task. Be it sorting, searching, looping through a list, outputting content to the screen or to a file - they can all be accomplished by a variety of differnet methods. PHP is no different, therefore it is worth looking at the different ways in which tasks can be performed, and benchmarking their performance. This allows us, as developers, to id...
By Mark Jones 21st August 2014
This series will guide you through the process of using TDD (Test Driven Development) in your own projects and will consist of three articles. This first article will explain what TDD is, the positives and negatives of TDD, and finally TDD in conjunction with Laravel. The second article will take you through the process of creating your first test which will be classed as user-interface testing. This type of test will ensure the correct things a...
By Christopher Horton 15th July 2014
WordPress has grown so much in recent years and has moved from a basic blogging system to a CMS (Content Management System). At Rapid Web Services, we often use WordPress to create websites for our clients, taking advantage of its unique template system to create bespoke designs with easy options for content management for our clients. WordPress also features a plugin architecture which allows for a lot of customisation to a WordPress website. W...
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 Kirsty Gasston 25th March 2013
There are so many ways to access the internet and view websites now – computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones – and figures show that over 10% of internet browsing worldwide is now done via a mobile browser. Of course users expect websites to display and function correctly across all of their devices. So what do we do as web designers to make sure that this is the case? We design sites to be responsive. Media queries are used to recognise th...