Latest news, web design articles, website design tips & tricks

Over the last 15 years e-commerce has changed a lot. In that time we've built many, many different types of e-commerce website design - from huge bespoke shops integrated into warehouse systems to the modern day Woocommerce stores. Even though e-commerce has changed one thing seems to have stayed staic - the payment providers. The two main payment providers in the UK - excluding Paypal - have been Worldpay and Sagepay (previously Protx) and most of the e-commerce website design projects we've undertaken have used one of these payment providers. My personal preference...

Owning and running a small web design studio can be very hard work at times. I often work very long hours, sitting at my desk for long periods of time absorbed in designs or working on complicated UI problems or bug fixing code. I’ve also been a website designer for far too many years now and although I have the perfect studio in a wonderful location I still lead a very work focused life. Unfortunately, this has taken its toll over the years and back problems have become a regular...

A web app and website built by kc web design kent in 2013 has won it's second award (It previously won HPM App of The Year 2014). The ThermaSolutions web app, designed and built here at kc web design, has come second in the HEATING & RENEWABLES AWARDS 2015 - Training Initiative app of the year category for its built in 'education centre' app that allows teaching organisations to set tests for heating and boiler engineers. Teachers can set the criteria and the app will give calculations and answers for testing. The idea...

A few weeks ago I saw a tweet by Paul Boag that mentioned a new project management tool for freelance web designers. I've been on the lookout for a simple project management tool for some of the web design projects I work on - some directly for clients but others where I work with a group of remote workers. I'm always a sucker for a new bit of software to play with so I had a look at the Kirby Project Hub. The website looked great but I couldn't see a way...

Second only to password hell comes data backup hell. In an ideal world I'd have super fast broadband (<rant>Yes, I'm pointing the finger at you BT, you who deemed it not economically viable to put in fibre broadband in our village yet less than a mile up the hill you did! Now thats really supporting British rural businesses!</rant>) and back everything up to the cloud in the blink of an eye. In reality, my 6mb internet connection manages to push up a few hundred MB of changed data per day...

Is your website design responsive? Does your website work well on mobile devices? No? Then you need to seriously consider making sure your website is mobile friendly otherwise it could have an effect on your search rankings. Google have announced that from 21st April all sites will be tested under a new responsive algorithm to see if they perform well on mobile devices. Sites that are responsive and do perform well will get a little rankings boost. According to the Google Webmaster blog... “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use...

Google has great tools for search engine listing, analytics to help see what people do on your website all sorts of ways to bring in leads via pay per click ads. But what if potential new clients were coming to your website and not using your nice new contact form or picking up the phone to call you? A lot of hard work goes into creating a good website design and making sure that website appears in Google for the right key words and phrases so that the right kind...

Intranets can be a complicated beast. Multiple departments fighting for importance can cause important tasks and information to be spread all over the content structure. When designing a successful intranet website design there are a few rules and recommendations that will help build a user tool for the user rather than a departmentalised catalogue. Workshops and research - If possible undertake internal workshops and research to try and understand what you user need. What do they use the intranet for? What daily tasks on the intranet help with their day to day jobs?...

We don't do a huge amount of product reviews on the kc web design kent website (but please do send us stuff if you'd like us to review it!  ;o)  but when we get a product as good as this its hard not to write about it. I recently bought a new iPhone 6 which felt like a huge leap forward from my old iPhone 4s in all sorts of ways, most notably the size. The iPhone 6 is flippin' huge compared to my old phone! I even have to...

Googles new No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA could change the way we think about form security. Most web designers don't like captcha security but they are a necessary evil these days. With the huge amounts of form spam we get some kind of auto form submission and bot security is needed on almost every form we create. Personally, I prefer to use simple captchas that don't get in the way of the user such as asking a simple question but even these aren't fall proof and sooner or later the bots beat...

I've been a web designer at kc web design kent for a long time. Before that I was a print designer. Before that I did a design post grad. Before that I did a photographer degree. Before that I used to design and make stained glass windows. Before that I used to sit in my bedroom and just draw. For as long as I can remember I've been creative and artistic and used my eyes as part of my job every single day. It's something I've really taken for granted...

I love sci-fi. Films, books, TV shows in fact anything with space ships, aliens or futuristic concepts normally grabs my attention. Being a web designer I also love typography. Typography in sci-fi films and books can be a wondrous thing and on the wall of the office here at kc web design we have some beautiful examples of 1960's sic-fi book cover design in some fantastic Isaac Asimov New English Library publications. I could bore you for hours about my favourite sic-fi films or book (currently the Void trilogy) and about...

Blocs is a new website designer app from the team that brought us Dev Rocket and other Photoshop plugins. It's a new website design tool for Macs that allows the designer to build websites very quickly and easily. At kc web design we like using responsive web design frameworks and our favourite is Bootstrap created by the Twitter team. Now in version 3, Bootstrap makes creating responsive website designs very easy and gives you a great foundation to build your unique website design onto. The new Blocs website designer app uses...

kc web design has launched Cirrus one - A new weather app for mobile devices with a unique feature...you can design your own icon layout! A few years ago we had an idea for a weather app. We started to create an iOS only version but soon decided the dev costs would be too high for a side project at a small web design studio so we shelved what we had and left it for a while. About 9 months ago we decided to revisit the idea of a weather...

The 3 main job types we get asked about a lot at kc web design ltd are web design consultancy, website design and builds on content management systems such as Wordpress and Expression Engine and cheap web design. We work on projects in all of these areas and they all have their own unique processes and pricing. Web design consultancy Web design consultancy usually involves high level research and design and less coding than other types of projects. We do a lot of web design consultancy work for well known brands, such...

ThermaCalc - a web app design created and built by kc web design ltd in 2013 - has been voted App of The Year by Heating Plumbing Monthly (HPM) Magazine. kc web design kent created ThermaCalc for ThermaSolutions back in 2013 and updated the app this year with major changes to the calculators to bring them in line with leading industry thinking. The web app design was built to work on all mobile devices as well as desktops and allows users access to a suite of tools to help with plumbing, heating and solar energy calculations and...

Yes, its another Dribbble invite giveaway but this time, instead of the normal 'show me your best work' type of affair I'm going to try something a little bit different. If you don't know about Dribbble - and every web designer really should by now - it's a fantastic community for web designers, graphic designers, icon designers and pretty much anyone related to the design world. You can post images of your latest web design or icon design and get feedback from the design community. It's also great to see what...

Like all good web design companies, sometimes at kc web design we slip a little on our SEO strategy while we're head down in projects. It happens. While I had some time this week I decided to go through our social media strategy and realised that posts we'd written on the kc web design Kent website hadn't been auto posting to our social networks. Over the years I'd used a number of different Wordpress plugins to auto-post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc but all of them were no longer working....

Starting on October 27th 2014, Geek mental help week is a week-long series of articles, blog posts, conversations, podcasts and events across the web about mental health issues, how to help people who suffer, and those who care for us. Mental health issues are all around us. At kc web design we recently redesigned the St Andrews Healthcare website and we were truly humbled by the work that goes on there helping people with all kinds of serious mental health issues. But it's also the little things that have an impact...

kc web design kent have recently launched a new website for Speedy Expo, a conference for Speedy customers and partners in the UK, in partnership with marketing company QRBT and Speedy Hire - a leading provider of tools and equipment for hire and sale to the construction industry. The Speedy Expo runs every year and is a 2 day event in October 2015 at the Telford International Centre organised by QRBT and Speedy Hire to bring together Speedy partners and customers. The show includes partner stands from the likes of JCB, Makita and...

Panic has released the latest version of Coda - it's web design and development app - and there's a lot to like in this new version. To be honest, this latest release of Panics Coda app doesn't feel very new to me but that's probably because I've been using it for over a year now while testing on the beta team. It started with just 30 of us and then grew to over 700 in the last few months. Some very cool new features were added that bring Coda up-to-date...

It's that time of year again. The BIG Apple announcement. And what a big one it was this year! Everyone suspected Apple would launch the iWatch (note they've now dropped the 'i') but not many predicted it would be such a hit. As a web designer and developer here at kc web design kent I have a keen interest in Apple announcements (will I need another device to test on!) and a new product is always exciting, especially when we've gone a few years without a new innovative product hitting...

I always have a bit of a soft spot for new software and apps. I love trying out new apps, especially at beta stage when they're all new and shinny and slightly broken! I'm also always on the hunt to find an app that makes email less painful. At kc web design Kent we use Postbox for our email - it's full of features, works great with multiple accounts and is easy to use but, it still looks like a traditional email client. Email needs to change Email has been...

Google fonts get used a lot on the web. Even though I have a Typkit account here at kc web design I still find myself using Google Fonts for certain web design projects. Their list of good web design fonts is always growing but here in lies the problem. Many times in the past, while working on flat graphic mockups of web design projects, I've needed to use a Google Font in a web design and the only way to do this was to download the whole library and install...

For a while now I've had a little side project bubbling around here at kc web design. I love weather. I love weather apps. So I've been creating my own weather app with some pretty unique features (all top secret!). I've had a number of proof-of-concept builds lying around that have utilised the Jquery UI script to deal with dragging, dropping and resizing but we've hacked it around so much to get it to do what we needed that its become a little unworkable. We did contemplate writing our own...

UK rural small businesses are being held back by lack of fast broadband says a new report by The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). As a web design Kent company based in rural England we're a bit limited on our broadband options. BT being the main option with a few others but they all have to use the same BT gear at the exchange so each offering is limited to the speed at the exchange. In a way we're luckier than most as the exchange nearest to us was upgraded a...

Every body wants cheap web design, but is it good for the customer? Well, no, it's a bit like everything else...you get what you pay for. I've had a lot of people come to me asking for help updating, fixing or even building new sites because of previous cheap web design builds from small companies that really didn't know what they were doing. It might not look like it sometimes but there is a lot more to creating a successful website than just sticking up a few pages. When you pay...

Ever since I started kc web design kent our website has been hosted on an eco-friendly server in the US by AISO.net. I try to be as eco-friendly as possible at home and with the business and I love the idea of our website living on a server that is completely powered by renewable energy sources. Unfortunately, living and working in the UK means we're a bit short of solar power which meant we had to use a hosting company in California. For a long time it was perfect BUT...

At kc web design kent we get a lot of request for small websites for businesses starting out on the web. Some have good budgets set aside but many just don't have the money for a full website design based on a content management system like Wordpress or Expression with a unique design. So, we got thinking and decided to create an online website builder just for small business with a low budget. Hello kc weblite. What is weblite? Weblite is a low cost website builder for small businesses. It has...

For a while now kc web design Kent have been working with Fujitsu UK & Ireland to improve large sections of their website. Over the past 12 months the changes that kc web design have made to specific sections and user flow have had a significant effect on user interaction, contact requests and engagement. One of the big projects we were involved in last year was the redesign of the Fujitsu UK websites contact process. The original contact process was a bit confusing and many users ended up trying to...