Technical notes about responsive web development
In this area of our blog we focus on the technical aspect of web development and server set-ups, sharing notes, code and our discoveries.
A PHP script to preview web design concepts in a browser
We've found that the best way to preview a web design concept is directly in an actual browser - we've put together a single PHP script to quickly and easily set up a browser based preview.
A Sass based combined drop down and mobile menu
We're constantly developing and styling drop-down and mobile menus - to speed up development we've developed a Sass/Compass driven solution, for easy configuration and re-use.
Setting up a VPS with Ubuntu - a list of shell commands to set up a web server
On occasion we deploy websites to a VPS running Ubuntu. In these cases we have to manually set up the web server via the command line - here's our annotated list of setup commands.
The redevelopment of our site
We've reflected on the development of our new site, discussing some of the trends of the last few years that have influenced the process. If you're planning to read on from here, we'd wager that you're in the industry too, or at least thinking about the process of re-developing your website. It's tricky, isn't it?
The web development apps we use and recommend
Below is a list of Mac apps we use on pretty much a daily basis for web development tasks. There are lots of lists like this on the net, but we'd like to share ours. If you're in the field, or perhaps if you are starting out, the following list may be handy. I've only listed apps that we use at least once a week (or really come in handy when we need them) and that we use directly for web development.
There is no 'secret recipe' to Search Engine Optimisation
I would say that nearly all unsolicited email we receive at the moment (ignoring typical spam) is from businesses offering Search Engine Optimisation services. It seems to be the 'big thing' on offer.
Running multiple development sites on one machine
We do the majority of our website development on macs, using MAMP as an easy to run webserver with Apache, PHP and MySQL. This setup is great for local development as the environment MAMP provides is very close to what most web hosts provide and the web server is easy to manage.