web development

We were given 6 weeks to build a new site for the TV show CyberShack. This site is a news and blog site to support the TV show and productions of Charlie Brown and his team at CBN media.

Design was given to us from Nick at Design is Kinky Studios. It consisted of a lot of rounded corners and was quite an image heavy design.

In addition to the build we also had to migrate over 5,500 previous articles and videos with help from Real World.

Some of the functionality isn't standard for a website and required some creative use of jQuery.

In the end we ended up with a site that's very easy to update and was cost effective to build.

Source: Flickr

It's official, pages that load faster will get a little bit more of Google's page rank goodness. How much I'm not sure, but it's now even more important to make sure your pages load fast. So given all else is equal the fast loading page wins.

The fact is that we're in the communication business and don't really want to waste the precious attention of our guests.

Now how can we get designers and clients to cut down on the number of objects? Also concerning is a general tendency of humans to fill any new capacity with crap. A faster internet connection hasn't resulted better communication, but usually more superfluous fluff that we think will somehow wow our visitors. Not only does this disrespect them it costs more to develop and serve and I believe offers marginal benefits if any. Would you wait around to load a site with a homepage of 800Kb when do you don't know exactly how good the information will be?

For now go and make sites that respect the visitor's attention.

Recently I've been busy with designing and building a new website for Package Central. This was the first major site we've built using the 960 grid system. The advantages of using the grid become immediately apparent when viewing the site. By using a grid CSS framework we significantly reduced both design and theme development times.

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