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

I've been a user/renter with LoveFilm for many years using their DVDs by post service. Over the last few years the streaming side of DVD rental has grown and grown and now there are lots of different offerings for watching DVD online. Lovefilm is still the only one doing rentals by post and as much as I try and use iTunes and Lovefilm instant we do still watch DVDs that come in the post. Sometime last year Amazon bought Lovefilm. Nothing changed. The service still worked, they added more films...

For a long time now I've been using Billings here at kc web design Kent for dealing with out invoicing and time tracking. I like Billings, it works well, has good invoice template customisation and is simple to use but it is no longer getting updated. Marketcircle have chosen to move a perfectly good single payment OSX app over to a monthly subscription fee so for an app I bought for £30 over 4 years ago I now would have to pay £10 per month for not much more benefit....

As web designers and developers we all do. We do it all the time here at kc web design kent. We spend weeks crafting a website design, building and coding the templates, adding content and tweaking for all the browsers and just before it goes live we add a link back to our web design sites in the footer. We're proud of the website designs we create and we want everyone to know who designed and built that website. Its also good for SEO...isn't it? Are a web designers footer...

This Dribbble invite giveaway is now closed... So, it turns out the one person who was going to get the invite has now already got one! I may give out the invite to a runner up...   kc web design Kent have another Dribbble invite giveaway for 1 (or 2 if we're feeling generous and we have lots of fantastic designers apply!) lucky web designer! If you're a talented web designer, graphic designer, UI designer, icon designer, iOS designer or any other type of designer with a fantastic web design...

At kc web design kent we've become obsessed with getting Wordpress to work at peak performance over the last few months so we thought it would be good to document some of things we've been doing to increase Wordpress performance and reduce loading times. Not all of these things work on all servers and you may get different millage out of some but they're all worth a try and a look at the principles behind them. First off, lets look at the server... Server optimisation The first thing to look...

My ageing original iPad 1 is still going strong but has slowly been relegated from a work device to a kiddies play thing so it was time for a long overdue upgrade. The original iPad isn't supported in the latest OS's and so trying to test new iPad apps we're designing at kc web design kent was proving a little tricky. I'd been reluctant to fork out for a new iPad this year knowing that a new iPad would arrive at the October Apple event so I've been waiting and...

I came across Dash - The API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager for OSX - in a tweet the other day and thought it sounded interesting and maybe useful at kc web design kent. At kc web design we work a lot with html, css, Wordpress, Expression Engine and all sorts of other code bases like PHP, Jquery, etc at kc web design kent and when forgetting syntax or functions it's a case of using Google or Stack Overflow to refresh your memory. When I'm using Coda I sometimes...

Recently, while sifting through Google Analytics data, I noticed that page load times on this particular website design were over 10 secs. This is a long time for a page to load and well over the recommended times. Google uses page speed as a metric now and so slow page load times could have an impact on search listings so having a fast website design is important. After optimising javascript loading and images as much as possible the website design was still loading quite slowly. To begin with it seemed...

In our previous article - kc web design kent – Why I hate iOS7 - I spoke about the reasons why I didn't like iOS7. Since that article there have been many more reasons not to like iOS7 and its many inconsistencies. Text padding and spacing still really plagues the OS in some very odd places such as when the wi-fi icon disappears and is replaced with the GPRS text. On my O2-UK network the GPRS text is almost overlapping the time. Buttons that would normally have had a border to...

So, Google has thrown its hat in the ring of web design tools with Google Web Designer. There seems to be a new web design tool coming out every other day at the moment, some good, some bad, some trying to be that all encompassing tool that will do everything a web designer needs. I'm not so sure as web designers that we need one tool that does everything. I like using Photoshop. I like coding in Coda. I like using Hammer for local dev. I like using Ghostlab for...

While developing a series of websites using the great Woocommerce for Wordpress the development process we're using at kc web design kent meant we needed to make copies of existing website designs and then redevelop them into new websites. Part of the process we went through at kc web design kent was changing the design and then adding a different set of products but to do this we first have to delete the existing ones. Adding products in Woocommerce is made very easy with the CSV import suite and updating...

I hate iOS 7. There, I said it! There's been a lot of talk about iOS7 over the past few months and last week it finally launched. Lots of people won't update yet but working in the web design and iOS design industry you kind of have to. So I did. To be honest I find it messy and cheap looking. The famous gradient icons just don't seem to work in places especially on the dock with certain colours. The dock - annoyingly (why can't we choose a colour for...

At kc web design kent we've spent the last few months building a new website for a well known sealants and glues company (Not Unibond, the other one!). It's a large project and the final website design will allow users to view a lot of products in a lot of different categories. Products can be listed in multiple categories such as products, brands and applications and be shown on the website in lots of different places. To accommodate the large number of categories kc web design kent needed to build...

Being so busy at kc web design kent doesn't leave much time for relaxing but when I do I love to watch films. Big screen, big sound, bliss. For a while now I've been looking at how to improve my media centre and get a setup that allows me to watch HD movies whenever I want, stream catch-up services and view my own media and music. There are a LOT of devices out there that try to be full on media centers - small ones, big ones, expensive ones and...

Wordpress has come a long way since it's early days as a simple CMS. At kc web design kent we used to build bespoke e-commerce systems for big wholesale clothing companies that would take months to develop and integrate with internal stock management and ordering systems. These days we don't do many bespoke e-commerce solutions but we do still create e-commerce website design here at kc web design kent. The costs involved in creating a bespoke e-commerce web design solution are high and can be prohibitive to most businesses so...

“kc web design make hand crafted websites...” - that's what it says on the new kc web design kent homepage. But what do we really mean by hand crafted website design? There's been a lot of talk on twitter recently about the word “craft” with a few top web designers saying it shouldn't be used in the web design industry but I disagree. Kc web design kent do make hand crafted website designs. The word craft, for me, means time, care and attention to detail and doing that with skill...

I enjoy writing CSS here at kc web design kent but sometimes in the thick of development my nice neat CSS documents can become a bit, well...messy. Most of the time I'm working alone on web design projects at kc web design kent so I always think it won't matter too much. But then I go and open a CSS style sheet from and old web design project to make some changes and I always have to edit the “messy” bit I left in. Still, I only have myself to...

It's been a while since I've done a dribbble freebie so with a few minutes free today I decided to pull out an old logo and do another dribbble freebie for the web design community. So, kc web design kent is proud to give out another dribbble freebie - Stacked note box icons. Eagle eyed web designers may notice and striking similarity to the logo for Noteboxapp.com. Well, it was kc web design kent that built Notebox back in 2010 and as the web app is no longer running as...

A few months ago at kc web design kent my trusty 2009 27" iMac started playing up. The screen started flickering in the left bottom corner and over the new few weeks it got progressively worse until one day the screen went black. Gulp! Deadlines. Panic... Luckily, I managed to get the screen working again, albeit with only one side working effectively. It turns out there are two LED's in the old iMac screen and the one on the left had blown sending that side of the screen into a...

It's been everywhere this week. Apples' new iOS 7 design has sparked much discussion in the web design world and the interwebs are rife with comments, critique, moans and admiration for the new iOS design. Designing iOS apps as we do here at kc web design kent means we have a vested interest in what happens with Apple products. A huge redesign of the core interface means a lot of changes for app designers in the future so its something that everyone in the industry is watching. The new design...

While struggling with Adobe Inspect today at kc web design kent on a new responsive web design project I saw a very timely tweet by Andy Clarke... Goodbye Edge Inspect, you subscription based son of a bitch. Hello @ghostlabapp, my new best friend. I'd never heard of Ghostlab before and had no idea what Andy was talking about but the mention of Adobe Inspect got my attention, especially as I was battling with testing a website design in multiple browsers on multiple devices. After a brief look at the Ghostlab...

kc web design kent are absolutely delighted to be working as web design consultants for Fujitsu.com, the global website of the electronics giant. After a successful launch of the new UK blog website kc web design kent were asked to come in at a high level to consult on web design issues on the global Fujitsu.com website. kc web design kent will be working very closely with Progress SEO to ensure any design and content related changes to the Fujitsu.com website are made based on factual design and SEO data....

We had a very interesting call at kc web design kent last week from Potable Water Solutions. Potable Water Solutions make the Hydro Voyager 3 - a new solution for purifying contaminated water. At kc web design kent we love helping out with good causes and Potable Water Solutions needed a quick landing page created for their new water purification system. We had very little time to get something designed for them and needed to take complete control of the whole process so that Potable Water Solutions didn't have to worry about a thing. We...

We all know we have to do, but finding time to write content for SEO can feel like a chore especially when you're working all hours on client web design work. Keeping on top of SEO writing and keeping your website full of fresh new relevant content is hard work and something that has to be maintained. We've been so busy here at kc web design kent for the last few months that I've let the content writing slip a little. I was writing 2/3 articles per week which really...

Its been reported quite widely  in the media this week that Wordpress has been under attack. Wordpress powers millions of websites so an attack like this is no small thing. Millions and millions of sites will have been hacked and the brute force attached looks like it was aimed at weak admin usernames and passwords. Probably an attempt to gain access to more servers for a bigger attack, the hackers targeted Wordpress websites with weak passwords that were still using the default admin login. Even Wordpress websites with different usernames...

Last week my iMac screen brightness started flickering. At first I thought it was my eyes playing tricks in the sun coming through the studio windows but after a few days I noticed a defined change in brightness in the lower left part of the screen. At kc web design kent we love iMac's because of the huge amount of screen space. Combined with a second 24" monitor and you have an almost perfect working environment for web design and iOS design work and coding. iMacs have been a part...

kc web design kent are delighted to be working with the wonderful Yohondo on their brand new iPad app. We'll be designing the user interface over the next few weeks to create a beautiful UI experience and craft an award winning app. Yohondo is a new iPad app designed for teaching grade 1,2 and 3 piano in a new and intuitive way. kc web design kent will be working with the Yohondo team to take their working wireframe app and turn it into a visual exciting, beautifully design experience for all...

Most people in the web design industry are aware of Mailbox - the new email client for iOS that claims to change the way we deal with email - and at kc web design kent we were very excited when it was launched. And most will also be aware of the sign-up system they used. After sign-up the user joined a queue and the app gave a count down to when it would be available. When I signed up I was about 700,000 in the queue and it took a...

After a good few hours trying to debug a web app in Mobile Safari here at kc web design kent we finally worked out that having private browsing turned on in the Safari settings was causing javascript and local storage to not work. Safari mobile seems to deal with private browsing differently to other browsers and it actually stops any kind of local storage from being set where as Chrome still allows a certain amount of storage to be accessed. To warn users that they have private browsing on we...

To be honest, I can't really remember my first website that well. It was over 15 years ago so specific facts feel a little fuzzy. Before I was a ’proper’ web designer (which is what I call myself now) I was a graphic designer for print and before I did that I was a photographer for a very short time and that's what I was doing when I built my first website. At the time I was at art college in Bournemouth and heavily involved in music. A good friend...