Hungerford Web Design Blog

We have launched the beta of a new site design (version 3).

Please do take a look around and let us know if there is anything you find which isn’t working. It is a beta (which means pre-release), as has become the norm, we have launched it as the final part of our testing.

I hope you enjoy it

The design is based on the Jet30 template (released under the creative commons licence) and has been heavily modified to suit our style, thinking and technologies. Some of the main points are:

AJAX
PHP
CSS
Live server status (using the script we posted here)
Mailing list signup
RSS *2
ROR sitemaps
XML sitemaps (standard and g’zipped)
We are also setting our titles using strings now so that we can use includes for the headers successfully. I’ll post more about that shortly. Have a good one

Our latest project for Dogue De Bordeaux website Rozeldogue is nearing completion. It is live and you can take a look at it now (although please bear in mind that we have some style changes still to make.

This project is pretty close to my heart as my dog comes from here.

What have we done?

SEO: focused links, keywords, emphasis on text and syntax. Google and DMOZ submission, RSS

Design: Brown and tan with images

Development: XHTML1.1 & CSS

Dynamics: News, RSS feed, customised coppermine gallery, embedded contact form and google maps location

Knwon issues: Widescreen monitors fail to display the menu bar correctly (To be resolved 02/03/08), CSS changes required for gallery display (To be resolved 03/03/08).

Please do take a look, we have 2 more ongoing projects for this customer so feedback is always welcome.

The blog was started in June 2007, personally, I think these numbers are pretty good for a site which emerged from obscurity. Finding the time (and thinking of the content) is actually far more difficult than I imagined and thinking of unique content is much more difficult than leaching it like a lot of others do:

Page views : 8581
Unique visits: 3702
Posts: 44
Comments: 6

Equally, here are the month by month stats since the root domain became live:
Feb-07 300
Mar-07 6532
Apr-07 1075
May-07 1865
Jun-07 6284
Jul-07 22147
Aug-07 9802
Sep-07 6329
Oct-07 11878
Nov-07 13118
Dec-07 6288

We Break up for Christmas tomorrow. I’d like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Here’s to 2008

I have been away for a while working on a number of projects but I have cleared the diary to add some more value here. If you have anything you would like to discuss or you would like some advice on any of the topics we cover here, please contact me.

It’s officially one month since this blog started. So far we have:

• Displayed over 3.5 thousand pages to nearly 900 unique visitors.
• Recieved an average of 30-50 unique visitors per day
• Written over 30 unique posts (roughly 1 per day) within 16 categories
• Deleted 46 spam comments
• Had 92 pages listed in google
• Had 22 Articles submitted to Digg with a total of 44 diggs (Although I must say that these figures are fudged as I tend to submit my own articles to make it easier to digg them).

It may sound a bit stupid but I am really proud of these achievements that have happened in just one month. Lets hope the trend of 0-900 visitors increases the same every month Although I’ll be the first to admit that I know they wont.

As always, if there is anything you would like to see me write about or any tool you would like to see developed then please drop me a line.

here’s to many happy months of blogging

Welcome to the hungerford web design blog. This blog serves as both a record of some of the things we are working on, some of our values and methods of working and also an informational resource for our visitors. These resources include links to things we think may be of interest, sites which may offer good services as well as tools/scripts/information to start or improve your website. Things such as Accessibility (Websites which are viewable by our disabled users), Security (protecting your site and your customers), Web standards (ensuring your site conforms to the defined standards of websites) and many other things are all covered here.

If there is a particular topic which you feel may be of interest then please do let us know. We will do our best