News, web design articles, web design tips & tricks archive

The key to designing the UI for Arxygens dashboard and admin product was keeping things simple and easy to use while having all the information easily accessible. For each campaign a lot of data needed to be shown and 90% of that data needed to be easily editable from a single location to make it quick to edit lots of campaigns. Columned layouts were used to make the most of space and allow better screen real estate on mobile devices. Actions that need the user to edit large amounts of information, such as categories, are accessed via a slide in panel to allow all edits to be actioned in one place. Colours were aligned with the brand and buttons given a hierarchy to denote the priority of the action.

Go To Hear is an artist-friendly ethical fair music streaming service. Go To Hears’ exclusive UI/UX design and features help artists, fans and music industry professionals to all earn a fair reward for their hard work. The Go To Hear mission is to transform the music industry focusing firstly on changing the rewards for artists and educating fans on what a ‘fair price for music’ culture should be like.

As part of our ongoing relationship with Fujitsu, we’ve been working with global teams to improve more sections of the website. We’ve been creating new website designs for industry verticals such as Global Retail, Healthy Living, Amazon AWS,Manufacturing, Hybrid Cloud, Cyber Security, Application Transformation, SAP, Insurance and more as well as improvements to the global newsroom and creating Online Maturity Assessment tools.

Go To Hear is an artist-friendly ethical fair music streaming service. Go To Hears’ exclusive design and features help artists, fans and music industry professionals to all earn a fair reward for their hard work. The Go To Hear mission is to transform the music industry focusing firstly on changing the rewards for artists and educating fans on what a ‘fair price for music’ culture should be like.

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? Why do they not use the current intranet? Most research and workshops with users and staff highlight needs for workplace solutions – task that help in daily jobs. Giving these high frequency tasks a greater priority in the navigation hierarchy will help the user find links quickly and easily. Taking a task based approach rather than something that mimics the organisational structure means more logical groupings that will transcend any organisational changes within departments at a later stage. This type of structure is also easier for the user as they’ll be going to the intranet with a specific goal or task in mind.

Navigation – Intranets can be full of information and so finding something quickly is very important. Using large menus can facilitate large numbers of sub page links in a format thats easy to scan through. Using large mega menus can also help by giving space to add descriptions below links to make it clear what info pages contain. Sub pages can also benefit from being in multiple top level categories, making them easy to find especially when a site goes through significant structural changes, as it would still allow users to find content that has moved.

Frequently used tools/Quick links – Intranets a full of tasks and so having an easy way to access the most used or common tasks is a real benefit. A quick links navigation feature could show more user focused tasks and/or frequently accessed pages such as Update my profile, My emails, etc.

Large footer area – A large footer area can be a good place to list lots of key page links in a format thats slightly different and easier to scan than a top level drop down style navigation. Footers can also hold key contact information, forms and other ways of getting in touch with staff.

Improved wayfinding – Many intranets have no clear way-finding mechanisms or breadcrumbs so once you’re on deep pages its hard to know where you are and how to navigate back. Intranets should have good breadcrumb trails and navigation highlighting to help with way-finding as the depth of information and site structure can be quite complicated.

Home page widgets – A good way of engaging with users is to show them what other users are doing. The homepage may benefit from content areas showing Popular Pages, Most Viewed Articles, etc so that important and widely used pages in the site automatically bubble up to the top level and are easily accessible from the home page. As well as news & events content areas the homepage may also benefit from other areas such as a small directory listing of some of the more common pages and tasks (with descriptions), an area showing news from a specific department based on the logged in users profile, noticeboards, etc.

With a simple task based approach, making sure key content is easily accessible and giving users a clear content hierarchy and flow an intranet can be designed to fulfil most organisations goals.

At kc web design kent we can help redesign your intranet using these simple rules. Get in touch today to discuss your intranet project.

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 app because in the past few years we still hadn’t seen anything come on the market that had that one killer feature that we’d always wanted to add. We also decided that native apps wasn’t the way to go so we designed and built a web based app that would work on all mobile devices.

This week we are launching Cirrus One slowly out into the wilderness. We’ve already had a few great reviews and the new weather app is also now in the Google Chrome Web Store. We want it to build slowly so we can keep a eye on server performance and the API’s we’ve used and make sure the experience stays consistent for everybody. With any new release it’s important to take things slowly and make sure everything is working as it should before diving in to a huge launch with thousands of users.

Over the next 6 months we have a great list of features we’re going to add including a new desktop version that will work as a chrome app, weather alerts so you know if you sunny day out fishing is going to change to a rainy day out! There will also be additions for user uploaded background images, more weather icons such as moon phases and much more.

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 around for a long time and in that time it hasn’t really changed much. You get an email, deal with it or delete it or file it. For most of us this has been enough but we get so many emails these days it’s become harder to manage and we seem to be constantly replying to and reading emails every few minutes. A few apps have come along to try and change the way we deal with email and Mailbox for iOS was one of the more successful ones. The iOS app is lovely and the way it works on the iPhone with the swipes is very nice. Earlier this year Mailbox said it was working on a Mac desktop version and a few weeks ago I got sent a beta coin (check out the very cool way you have to drag and drop the coin on to the can to start the beta app!).

Mailbox on the Mac looks as lovely as it does on iOS, it’s very minimal with nothing getting in the way of reading and archiving emails. It doesn’t seem to deal with multiple accounts very well at this stage but hopefully that will be resolved and it only works with iCloud or Gmail accounts. The interface is very simple and clear and the way it deals with emails is the same as the iOS version with options to  archive emails to a date or a list. These options also work with mouse or trackpad gestures so a simple swipe left or right on a magic mouse will evoke the archive menus which is a very quick and satisfying way to quickly deal with emails.

All in all I really like the feel of Mailbox. I have lots of email accounts so I need a good way to manage all of those from one place so we’ll have to see how the Mailbox team improve that side of the app. I think the big thing for me is that the app still feels like just a way to archive emails into different folders which is something I do in Postbox anyway. Admittedly Mailbox does do this very, very well though. I still think there’s a better way to deal with emails, something that treats them more like conversations or groups of conversations and not just single messages to be moved around. Maybe there’s another email app out there….

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 contact wrong departments or just gave up along the way. As a large IT company, Fujitsu needed a simple contact path for all types of user and department. The design and user journey for each type of contact at Fujitsu was researched, wire-framed and redesigned and the changes we made had a very significant effect…

…in 2013-14 we noticed that a large number of people were completing the wrong forms, and more people were visiting the contact page than were getting in touch with us. We commissioned some usability research, which identified problems with the contact process. kc web design recommended changes to the home page and the contact page, and provided the necessary design elements to place on these pages to maximise use of the correct forms. In addition, they made recommendations regarding effective imagery and placement of contact placards. That work made the contact process considerably more efficient, reducing the number of people incorrectly using the B2B contact forms by over 70%. The design elements used are now being adopted by other countries – for example, the Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand home pages now use the new contact process designed by kc web design.

kc web design will be working with Fujitsu on more projects over the coming months and we hope to create more changes to the UK website that will have a significant effect on Fujitsu’s online business.

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 at is the server and with htaccess files enabled there are a few tricks that we can use to speed things up. A great place to look at advanced htaccess rules is the brilliant HTML5 Boilerplate but it can get quite complex. To start with lets just tackle the major ones.

GZIP and Deflate

Compression is very important and can speed up your WordPress site a considerable amount. Check if either of these modules are installed for Apache or just add the code for both into your htaccess file. Here’s an example for deflate. Please note the mod_filter wrapper around this code, if you don’t have the filter module enable in Apache then this won’t work so check its installed or in later versions of Apache just remove these wrapper tags.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<IfModule mod_filter.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom+xml \
application/javascript \
application/x-javascript \
application/json \
application/rss+xml \
application/vnd.ms-fontobject \
application/x-font-ttf \
application/x-web-app-manifest+json \
application/x-httpd-php \
application/xhtml+xml \
application/xml \
font/opentype \
image/svg+xml \
image/x-icon \
text/css \
text/html \
text/javascript \
text/plain \
text/x-component \
text/xml
</IfModule>
</IfModule> 

EXPIRES CACHING

Setting the cache expiry means the server won’t be dishing out new files with every page request which will speed things up for the user. Make sure to set the limits at a realistic level and if you site is always changing then set them shorter. If it never changes then set them longer!

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
</IfModule>

Set keep-alive’s

When you run Googles Pagespeed tests – which you really should be doing – it sometimes alerts you to keep alives. This is to do with the server keep connections open while serving all the files and not closing the connection after each file is served. If you’re serving lots of small files then closing and opening new connections each time can slow things down. To keep connections open you can add this to the htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Connection keep-alive
</IfModule

Memory limits

WordPress can be power hungry at times. We’ve had instances at kc web design kent where a new VPS with only 256 memory was struggling with a basic WordPress site. If you can, go for more memory on your server and then change the default memory allocation for WordPress by adding this in the htaccess file.

php_value memory_limit 128M php_value upload_max_filesize 20M php_value post_max_size 20M

There are many, many more things you can do with a htaccess file but these will make a big difference on the speed and performance of you WordPress site and should be done on all installations.

WordPress optimisations

When using WordPress it’s important to know what it’s limits are and how it works on a server. We’ve already mentioned that it can be quite power hungry so just throwing any old template on it for a professional website isn’t always the best idea.

When creating your won WordPress web design theme for a client try and limit the amount of database calls you use to pull out paths to CSS and JS files and reduce the amount of queries. When using a bought theme check its not one that gives you endless options for this frontage or 3 different shop systems or endless page layouts as these will significantly increase the amount of data pulls on the site even if you’re not using half of what available in the theme. You can trim things down by removing php paths and hard coding things.

Another area to be watchful of is plugins. They can add lots of files and weight to a page that you just don’t know about. If you can do it yourself with code you know in the theme files then thats the way I would go first. If you do need a plugin then try a few out, read reviews and forums and test on a dev platform first before using on a live site.

Be careful of render blocking elements. Google Pagespeed loves this one and its always cropping up, especially on WordPress sites. Render blocking elements are CSS or mainly JS code in the head of a page that prevents the rest of the page loading and working before these files have loaded themselves. Jquery is the main culprit and some WordPress plugins like to stick a lot of code in the head so watch out for those. These days its good practice to put all JS in the footer to avoid this problem. If you have to put scripts in the head you can add this little bit of PHP code just before you body tag to help ease the problem…

<?php flush(); // http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#flush ?>

And lastly, minify all HTML/CSS/JS and use a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache to speed up serving pages to users. After you change any of these points above check on Google Pagespeed for improvements and keep optimising until you get a good score.

Oh, and one more thing, you could also use a CDN service like Cloudflare to server all you static files. We used it on kc web design kent as a test and saw some big improvements.

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 truly terrible ones! Because of my day job as a designer at kc web design kent any system I buy has to be user friendly with a great UI design which seems to rule out 90% of the list. Why are home media interfaces so bad? All they need to do is connect with the user and make it easy to find things – sounds simple yet most companies get this wrong. Of the few that get this right, their media centers never quite hit the mark, there’s always one component I need missing. Living and working at kc web designer in the uk I want uk catchup tv such as BBC iplayer and 4OD as well watching films from LoveFilm but there are very few systems out there that allow all of this. Most seem to have Netflix but in the uk there offering is pretty dire.

I’m still considering an apple tv but until they allow apps on it then iplayer and lovefilm are a dream. Recently Google released the Chromecast. At first glance it seems to simple to be worth looking at. After looking at how it works and the potential for add-ons then it might become a contender. It’s such a simple idea – and a cheap one looking at the £23 price tag – that it just might work and take the market by storm. Google have had 2 other attempts at this market so time will tell but at the moment it looks interesting and at this price is not going to break the bank to try it. It might also be an interesting way of showing showing a simple stats page in the browser on the TV in the office at kc web design kent. Who knows what interesting third party apps will be created by the community!

I don’t think the perfect media centre is out there just yet but things are changing and google might just push apple into changing the apple tv for the better.

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 blame.

The other day I came across this fantastic article on github about how to write, layout, structure and use proper selectors in your CSS documents. There are quite a few of these types of articles knocking around but for some reason this one seems to strike a cord with my style of writing and thinking about CSS in web design. This article is well worth a read and a bookmark and I can see myself coming back to this again and again.

From the simple contents structure to how to indent and layout your document in a well ordered, easy to read manner with nicely formatted comments, indenting and hierarchy (cascade) for easy finding of CSS styles in a structure similar to your HTML doc it all seemed to make more sense than previous articles I’d read. As well as small web sign projects at kc web design kent I do work on other large website design projects in bit teams of people and have never rally seen a perfect way of dealing with CSS doc layout. I’m very keen to try and stop my CSS docs becoming messy on web design projects at kc web design kent, and to try and clean up team based CSS doc writing, so I’m going to try and stick to the methods in this guide for a few months and see if it makes a difference to my web design projects and those larger team based projects to.

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 helped with the ‘web design kent‘ keywords and meant that kc web design kent were on page 3 for ‘web design kent‘, page 1 for ‘freelance web designer kent‘ and a few others. Unfortunately, after a month or so of not writing many articles and letting things slip a little we have now dropped down to page 6 for ‘web design kent’! Thats a few pages down is as many weeks!

For any online business, staying up in the organic search results is extremely important and this little (unscheduled) experiment shows that you HAVE to keep up with the content writing for your listing to stay consistant. At kc web design kent we know have a hard slog in front of us to get back up to page 3 for ‘web design kent’ and our other search terms. Sometimes, when you’re working hard it difficult to think of things to write about. Checking news websites and setting up Google alerts on related topics can help find inspiration, then it’s just a case of finding the time. Setting aside 15 minutes and writing a new article first thing in the morning is the best way. It gets it done before any other distractions take over. If you find inspiration hits then don’t forget to write as many articles as you can, you can always save them or schedule them for publishing later when you’re a bit stuck for time.

So, the lesson learnt is to stick with it, keep on writing regular articles and stay up in the search listings.

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 few weeks for the app to become available. Not everyone was very keen on this sign-up process but as a way of rolling out a new app slowly I can see its benefits.

After a long wait I finally got to the use the app and I have to say that it is very nice. Its well exicuted, it looks great and works very well. Does it change the way we deal with email? Maybe. But I can’t help but feel like its just a bunch of folders and actions tagged on to a Gmail account. For people that use their iPhone for dealing with all their email on the go then Mailbox is a great email client. But for the rest of us, such as web designers like us at kc web design kent, then it doesn’t get used that much. A desktop version would be much better and hopefully now that Mailbox has been acquired by Dropbox we might see more development on the desktop version. But again, would the desktop version just feel like a nice interface over a few folders and actions tagged on the Gmail?

There are lots of different ways of dealing with emails and inbox-zero and a lot of them do this with specific folders and actions. At kc web design kent we use a simple method of having a smart folder for incoming unread mail, one for emails flagged as to-do and a few other folders. So could this method be used to attain the same email flow as Mailbox? I think it could be done and even made into some kind of plugin for email clients like Postbox. A few simple folders and actions could mimic what Mailbox does quite easily. If I get time over the next few weeks and client work at kc web design kent doesn’t get in the way too much I might give it a try. If it works I’ll post the results here!

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 can do a little check with javascript…

var testKey = 'qeTest', storage = window.sessionStorage;
 
 try {
 // Try and catch quota exceeded errors
 storage.setItem(testKey, '1');
 storage.removeItem(testKey);
 } catch (error) {
 if (error.code === DOMException.QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR && storage.length === 0)
 alert('Please make sure you have private browsing turned off in your Safari settings to use this website');
 else throw error;
 }

This will check whether local storage can be set and if not warn the user that they have private browsing turned on. Hopefully this will help anyone else that comes up against this problem.

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 worked at the local independent record shop (back when record shops still sold records) and asked if I’d be interested in looking into a website design. As I mentioned before, exact memories are a little faded (I was at college!), but from what I can remember I knew a bit about the web but absolutely nothing about how to make a website. Still, like all good students I needed the money so agreed to look into building a website for the record shop.

Im not sure whether it was the lure of money or the access to free music and beer that drove me on, but armed with a copy of the latest web magazine and whatever other information I could get my hands on I set about learning how websites were made. My first real experience in front of a computer coding was very different to reading about it on paper. At the back of the shop was a set of stairs going down into a basement that was no bigger than a very small single bedroom. The room was full from floor to ceiling with records with a small space left for a PC. Windows 94 at its best! In this dark basement with the sound of dJ’s checking out the latest vibes (that’s it, that’s what e record shop was called – Vibe Records!) floating down from above I set about trying to construct a website.

All I really remember is battling with tables, endless nested tables just to get a logo in the right part of the screen. There was no CSS, or not that I knew off and html 1 was all I had to use. I remember swearing a lot trying to hand code complicated table layouts with rows and columns and spacer gifs. It took weeks of sweat and tears and checking in Netscape navigator (go and check it out kids, it’s the granddaddy of all modern browsers) to create a very basic website but I was very proud and the shop was very pleased. 12 months later the shop had gone and so had my their website.

What would I do differently? Well, pretty much everything actually. The web is a totally different place these days and the web design industry has gone through many changes in the last 15 years. I saw the death and rebirth of the web design industry and how it’s come alive in the last few years with a fantastic community. It’s like no other industry I know. I’d do everything different today if I built that website again but then I’d probably do it different if I built it again in 12 months time. The web design industry moves that fast. That’s why working in this industry is so exciting and why you should always be learning and why you should treat every website like its your first.

This article is an entry about website design for the 123-reg My 1^st Website competition . You can see more info here…http://www.123-reg.co.uk/first-website-competition.shtml

Working in an online business like kc web design kent means that almost every working day I’m logging in and out of services or apps. Every day my whole online life is governed by passwords for email accounts, online web design services, social media, to-do lists and more. It feels like every month or so now some online service gets hacked and we all have to change our passwords again. In the last few months we’ve had Dropbox, Twitter and now Evernote is the latest victim.

On Evernotes website they apologise “for the annoyance” and say that data is safe although passwords were breached. I suppose thats all it has become now, an annoyance. Not the ‘end of the world’ catastrophe we all used to think it was when something got hacked but just an inconvenience and one that we can fix just by changing a password.

The problem with all this is when your daily online life is so full of passwords that you start using the same ones for everything. I know I’ve done this in the past. But with the ease that hackers are gaining entry to major online services its time to be a little more security conscious and make sure you don’t use the same passwords for multiple services. At kc web design kent we use password systems such as 1Password to help remember all our online log ins and to stop the need for having to remember hundreds of passwords. Other systems are available but as we use Macs and iPhones here at kc web design kent then a native app that works on all our devices is our best option.

So don’t take the chance, make sure your passwords are secure and not the same on multiple accounts and use a tool to remember them. This way it stays and annoyance and not a catastrophe when you loose data or find your personal details have been used for something else.

At kc web design kent we believe that website design for start-up businesses is very, very important. Any website design created for a brand new company needs to work very hard and be cost effective, especially if that website is the whole business for an online start-up.

Anyone starting a new business venture will have limited funds, big plans and big ideas and will want the best possible website for their new venture. The key to getting a great website design for a new business is to be considered and logical and work with a website design and development company right from the beginning. Building a website that will grow with the company and provide a foundation that can be expanded on as the company grows is vitally important. Nobody wants to have to redesign a website 12 months after launch because it can’t change and adapt with a new business. The only way to achieve this is to talk to a website designer and plan from the start. This will be especially important if a new business is purely online based and needs a web app or iOS app to generate revenue. Even before the business gets started it’s important to get a good web designer or developer on board to help plan and guide you though areas of web design that may not be immediately obvious. At kc web design kent we’ve come across lots of small businesses that haven’t planned properly at the beginning and end up spending a lot of money putting things right. This can be avoided if a good web designer is found at the right stage of the project.

At kc web design kent we believe in working with our clients to create beautifully crafted websites and web app experiences. We enjoy working with start-ups right from the beginning and can advise in all aspects of starting an online business. kc web design kent are experts in creating web apps using the latest technologies and understand whats involved in created a solid foundation for an online business or business website. Get in touch to find out how we can help your new business get started.

On Monday evening the kc web design Kent website went down. Sometimes it does this when our hosting company reboot servers or do routine maintenance. We host the kc web design Kent website with a company in California called AISO.net who are an eco-friendly hosting company powered by solar and wind energy. kc web design Kent have been hosting with them for over 7 years now and they’ve always been great, until Monday night. What we thought was a maintenance blip turned into an 18 hour outage with no website or email and lots of panicking!

kc web design kent are a very conscientious company and the environment is high on our list of concerns, especially for a tech based company, so we do what we can to help the environment with our solar powered hosting. All well and good, but the hosting company being based in California did cause a few problems this week because when the kc web design kent website was down it was the middle of the night in California and so no support staff were contactable. Hence even more panic. To be fair to AISO.net, once I’d got hold of their support staff they were very good (and I apologise for the language used prior to that!) but the wait was unbearable and almost a whole night and day without the kc web design kent website and email was starting to take its toll.

Two things came up in the panic – backups (yes, we had them, no they weren’t up to date) and Google rankings. How would our rankings be effected after the site was down for over 18 hours? We don’t know yet but hopefully nothing. After looking into our backups, which were done by the host, we’ve decided to take a different line and do offsite backups from within WordPress using the ‘WordPress Backup to Dropbox’ plugin. I’m a lot happier now that I can see the kc web design kent website getting backed up to Dropbox!

So why did the kc web design kent website disappear for 18 hours? Well, it turns out it was human error and some account spring cleaning…the wrong button was pressed and our account was terminated by mistake! Lets hope it doesn’t happen again!

kc web design ltd work on web design and development in kent, Canterbury, the South East, London and the rest of the UK. We also have global clients from all over the world such as the Toll Group and Fujitsu amongst others but for 2013, as a freelance web designer and user interface (UX/UI) specialist, I’d love to do some work with a local web start-up or Apple software company. Working on web design and development in kent is a lovely way to work and the web design and development projects we do here at kc web design kent are very exciting to work on, but, as a new venture for this year I’d love to do more work with a start-up at ground level and work on a long term project outside of kc web design kent at a level where I can really make a difference.

At kc web design kent we have our side projects such as Deltr and our new weather iOS app to keep us busy and especially with Deltr I work on the web design and UI/UX at a senior level but it would be great to help out another company starting in the web/online world to achieve greatness this year. This is a massive stab in the dark but, if you’re a local web start-up in and around Kent and you’re reading this and need some web design and development in kent then give me a call.

Web design and development in kent from kc web design

As a web design studio producing web design and development in kent we excel in what we do here at kc web design kent. We specialise in creating beautiful websites, designed to your own unique specifications and business goals and built on leading industry content management systems such as WordPress and Expression Engine. We create websites of all sizes and complexities and will work closely with you all the way along the project with special attention to the planning stage. So if you need a new website in 2013 or some  web design and development in kent then give kc web design kent a call.