Web development

  • Dan Sheerman

    Initial thoughts on using Gutenberg

    Dan talks about his experience of developing the new Headscape site, with a focus on working with the Gutenberg editor.

  • Chatbots, always available customer support or know nothings?

    After reading Build Chatbots with PHP by Christoph Rumpel I started making some simple chatbots and quite quickly moved on to more complex interactions. It didn’t take long to get something basic up and running, which in turn, got me really excited about the possibilities.

  • Marcus Lillington

    Can’t get any user input?

    We all – rightly – point at user research as the foundation of any good web project. Thorough user research equals focused and usable products, right? But what should we do if we can’t get to those users?

  • Marcus Lillington

    Are carousels that bad really?

    I want to challenge current web industry thinking concerning carousels/sliders/galleries (which is – in a nutshell – they’re bad) with what, seemingly, most of the world thinks of them.

  • Marcus Lillington

    Readability apps and why they annoy me

    Readability apps like Hemingway have bugged me for a while and I haven’t been able to put my finger on why. So, I thought I’d lay out my ideas here to see if I can get to the bottom of it.

  • Chris Scott

    Three practical ways Google Site Search offers a superior experience

    Your content management system’s native search will do a good job for standalone websites. But what if you’ve got a more complex situation? Google Site Search might be the right solution.

  • Dan Sheerman

    How to choose the right technology for your project

    Sometimes we have technologies foisted upon us. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s good. This post examines approaches we can all learn from when selecting technologies.

  • Chris Scott

    Searching for the ideal search solution

    Over recent years we’ve used either native Drupal search or SOLR in our web projects. Neither has been ideal. Recently though we’ve been deploying Google Site Search and we like it a lot.

  • Marcus Lillington

    The homepage is dead. Long live the homepage.

    Or, more precisely, the homepage is not as popular as it once was. But, it’s still quite important, at least for now. Not such a pithy or, er, linkbait-y title though is it.

  • Chris Scott

    British Medical Association Award for COPD app

    Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a disease of the lungs that affects around 1 million people in the UK.

  • Chris Scott

    Who should I bring to the kick-off meeting?

    Recently, a new client asked me who should participate in the kick-off meeting for a project to design a website that would communicate the outcomes of a large research study.

  • Sorry, your site is not responsive

    Responsive sites are here and have been for a while now. I think they’re great but I cannot help feeling that a lot of people are missing an important point.

  • Enjoying getting it wrong

    During my teens and twenties I spent a lot of time skateboarding. It’s quite a unique sport in the way it influences your life as a whole. For example, you begin to look at architecture in a new creative way. You also fall over, a lot.

  • Ed Merritt

    Creating useful pattern libraries

    Pattern libraries are great, but designing them (well) is difficult.

  • Dan Sheerman

    The life/work imbalance

    Working 24/7 doesn’t make you any better or worse at your job, it will just burn you out. I’ve been there, and I’m not going back.

  • Marcus Lillington

    Does Agile methodology lead to poor interface design?

    There has been a lot of finger pointing at frameworks such as Bootstrap for an apparent depreciation in design standards lately. But, I think that Agile methodologies have something to answer for as well.

  • Leigh Howells

    Does your site have charisma?

    Over the last couple of years I’ve heard many people bemoan the fact that a lot of websites “are all starting to look the same”. There’s a certain amount of truth in this.