Looking around at CSS showcase sites recently, we decided that there’s room for a more usable, functional website which takes into consideration the needs of the modern web designer/developer.
Our plan is to split out the categories into meaningful segments, such as AJAX websites, Design sites, etc, but with a difference, the top ranked website by our readers won’t be at the top of the page, the 101st website will be! This way, up and coming websites can get a look in and start building up their popularity.
The only two problems we have in developing this project are:
No money
No time
With that in mind, we’ve blanked out a weekend in our calendar: 10am-10pm Saturday the 12th July 2008 and Sunday 13th July 2008. One back end developer, one front end developer working simultaneously on the project with targets set for every two hours, we’re going to see if we can build an entire web application in just two days!
We’re planning on using CodeIgniter as our frame work, on a LAMP system, possibly with WordPress to write a blog every two hours detailing our plans and progress.
Watch this space for more details and to see if we can do it!
After years of constant development, the people who make WordPress have made a major jump forward with usability and functionality in their user interface.
Not only is it far prettier, it contains many improvements and functional changes to help the end user. According to Matt over at Wordpress dot Org:
…multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages…
Here at Best Served Cold, we’ve already upgraded several installations for our clients who have been extremely satisfied with the new release. A simple upgrade can be done for less than £250 +VAT, if you want to find out more:
Our latest client site is launched today - Lennox Rods.
Lennox produce travel fishing rods to the highest quality and will make a bespoke, hand crafted specialist fishing rod for any type of fishing you plan on doing - Trout, Salmon, Blue Water and others.
I think I might have missed this somewhere over the last year but I love the intro to this skateboarding video. Directed by Spike Jonze with music from M83, it looks incredible and the music fits perfectly.
That final explosion was the most dangerous, apparently using napalm to create the effect.
More about Lakai (the company responsible) and the movie at the Lakai movie pages.
If you can get the DVD in the UK I’d like to see it - otherwise in the US You can see view it here.
You can’t drink just six apparently. So, this was thought to be a marketing plot for Cloverfield (see our 11808 update but now it’s appeared in Heroes and there are rumours of a Lost appearance this season.
This all looks like a bit of an in-joke to me but it’s all good fun. I haven’t been able to find those pictures of the Lost cast with Slusho’s and t-shirts yet, maybe it’s all building up to a massive Lost/Cloverfield/Heroes mashup?
Our latest site to go live is for a PR company based in Brighton: Liberate Media.
The site is a bespoke WordPress template and integration with the aim to show the company in a corporate but accessible and modern light. We hope you like it!
Web accessibility is one of those areas of web design that is vague, hard to understand and, to a lot of people, hard to implement. With the range of browsers, mobile devices and huge numbers of people searching the internet every day, how can you design an attractive, usable site that is also accessible to everyone?
The answer lies in how you work and how a new website design is formed, from the initial mockups and design through to templates, coding and the final, live site.
At Best Served Cold we start the design process with a knowledge of web accessibility and strict xHTML/CSS coding in mind. From the beginning of each website build we look at how the site will need to work with different technologies and what we can do to make those technologies accessible.
By using a system called semantic markup we ensure that each website is readable by all web browsers - even PDAs and mobile phones. This system of coding a website coupled with the strict use of xHTML and CSS gives our sites a great start towards full accessibility standards.
By coding to WAI guidelines we also give all our sites a headstart with SEO as many of the best practices used to optimise for search engines are also at the heart of a fully accessible website.
If you’d like to know more about accessibility please contact us. We are also available to consult on all aspects of web accessibility from initial design and code through to recommendations on existing websites.
Over the last 6 months we’ve been working a lot on WordPress sites - designing, templating and coding new sites and working with existing sites to integrate seamlessly. This site is WordPress based and we try to keep it up to date with the latest accessibility and xHTML/CSS standards - even if the news isn’t updated as often as we’d like!
We’ve noticed that there are a lot of WordPress sites that deal with themes and plugins but not many people talk about converting an existing design or bespoke solution into a WordPress template.
By working with a new design or integrating an existing website’s template into WordPress you end up learning a lot more about the background code than you would otherwise. With this experience we’ve found that WordPress can be used to power much larger and more complicated sites than just a simple blog.
With some judicious use of pages, categories and sub-categories and a bit of tweaking of the background code we are now able to design and build quite complicated, fully updateable sites with WordPress that are easy to navigate, accessible, use strict xHTML/CSS standards and can be updated very simply.
If you would like to know more or find out if we can do something similar for your site, please contact us
After years of constant development, the people who make WordPress have made a major jump forward with usability and functionality in their user interface.
Not only is it far prettier, it contains many improvements and functional changes to help the end user.
