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

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...

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....