By Jordan Hall 3rd September 2014
As a business you want a fast, secure and user friendly payment system for your e-commerce website. Stripe provides such a solution. A good payment system will ensure your potential customers do not get confused or annoyed and proceed to finish their purchase without issue, converting leads directly into a sale. Stripe also does not require a dedicated merchant account and should work with any accepted bank account. It also benefits from lower ...
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 Kirsty Gasston 6th August 2014
Following on from my previous post, which explained how to set up a personal Google+ profile and your Google Authorship, I now move on to how to set up Google Plus Business Pages. To get started with creating a Google+ company page, you need to log in to Google with the account which will own the page (other users can be invited to be managers of the page, but there can only be one owner). Then select ‘Pages’ from the menu on the top left. ...
By Tim Lees 29th July 2014
Understanding Google Analytics can be quite a daunting prospect if you are not familiar with the service. This series of guides aims to provide a simple introduction to help an owner of a website get the most out of their account. This guide is based on Google's Universal Analytics rather than the Classic Google Analytics. If you want to know more about the differences and whether you are using one or the other please click here. The a...
By Kirsty Gasston 22nd July 2014
Google+ (or Google Plus) is Google’s social media channel – their equivalent of Facebook or Twitter. Setting up your Google+ profile correctly and actively using Google+ as a social network using a Google+ company page can be a great help to your search engine optimisation. Google Authorship is how Google associates authors with articles that they write across the web. Ever seen listings in your search results on Google with a thumbnail of th...
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 Jordan Hall 20th June 2014
Note: The following article is satire. We urge you not to follow its advice. So, you want to make yourself (or your client) a terribly insecure website? No worries, here is our guide to making your easily hackable dream come true. Passwords - Passwords are a complete waste of time, aren't they? They inconvenience you...
By Peter Chiu 19th June 2014
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important part of getting your website noticed by Google and other search engines. However, the landscape of SEO has changed dramatically over the past few years. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and endless link building, the focus these days is on making sure that the website author is writing good quality and relevant content for the target audience with a large emphasis on user experience. With ...
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 ...
By Jordan Hall 19th May 2014
As a developer, I have plenty of outside interests surrounding new technology. One of these major interests is Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency. I've written about Bitcoin several times so far on this blog, including why you should accept bitcoins on your e-commerce website and using the BitPay payment gateway to actually take payments with Bitcoin. An interesting project I'd heard about recently is Node Webkit. Node Webkit is a freely available, ope...
By Peter Chiu 14th May 2014
Page speed is a term which is increasingly being used across the web and this down, in part, to search engines, such as Google, who take into account page speed analyses in their page ranking algorithms. Additionally, however, research shows that website users expect pages to load quickly. In fact, 40% of users will abandon a slow page after 3 seconds. For those who are not familiar with the term, Page Speed refers to the speed at which your w...