Blog
News, comment and useful stuff from time to time
Bootstrap and LESS for CSS 10 Sep 2012
From a web design point of view, nothing as inspiring as Twitter's Bootstrap has come along for seveal years. It's a set of HTML and CSS templates which make developing nice, tidy and fully featured websites awesomely easy. All you need to do is add content.
For the more tecnically minded, the new LESS for CSS method can be used to edit its stylesheets, and it comes with a comprehensive set of javascript plugins which work beautifully and are really straightforward to implement.
To get started, take a look around the Bootstrap site, from where you can download all the files.
Is social networking worthwhile? 17 Feb 2012
It bugs me somewhat that social networking gets more attention than it really deserves. A much commented thread at webmaster world on the subject muses on the subject. We certainly can't write it off or discount it entirely, but right now it seems to be in a formative phase where in real terms it's too disparate - and, to an extent, quite commerce averse - to represent a viable way of getting response considering the effort required. Don't get me wrong: for certain niche businesses it can be very good; it's just that most too much time spent on this could distract you from a more important issue: responding to Google's relatively recent 'Panda' update. This seems to favour immersive and content-rich sites. As a small business you're don't need to achieve Pixar-like production standards. Some informative short videos streamed from Youtube, plenty of good quality photos, and regularly updated pages should yield results with this twist on the algorithm. Plus it will appeal to your users, which is really what you should be aiming to do.