A requirement that sometimes comes up at the beginning of a new project is that we should supply a text-only version of a website, often purportedly for improved accessibility. I thought I’d write a quick post to outline my thoughts on why this is a bad idea, and why we encourage our clients that it’s something best avoided.
Continue reading “Why you don’t want a text-only version of your website”

Steve Mason, Senior Developer and hat wearer

Imagine Olympic 100m champion Usain Bolt winning an egg and spoon race: an expected result but an achievement nonetheless. That’s probably a bit how Senior Developer Steve Mason felt as he got himself certified as an EPiServer CMS developer.

Around the Cubeworks office Steve is known as ‘The Legend’ because of his vast knowledge and lightning speed in all things coding. Steve has already played a big part in developing EPiServer sites for Chichester College and Sanyo, so we felt confident he’d ace the test. And he did! Good to get the certificate up on the wall, especially as Cubeworks does more EPiServer sites for clients.

Steve is now in intensive training for the three-legged race.

In my previous blog post, Heavy Lifting (save money – don’t reinvent the wheel), I introduced the concept of Heavy Lifting – using tools provided by specialist websites to introduce functionality into your own as quickly and cheaply as possible.

It’s always easier to explain a concept with an example, so without further ado I present to you The Cubeworks Music Match Maker! Have a play around with it – enter a list of musicians/bands that you like (separated with commas) into the box, then click “match me up” to find the Cubeworks team members that have similar taste. Seeing as we’re a fickle bunch musically, I’ve added a list with a few suggestions in case you’re not getting many matches.

Continue reading “Building a music matchmaker with last.fm (aka Heavy Lifting Part 2)”

Google have recently launched a new tool which allows any user to add a comment to any page on your website. Yes, you heard that right… ANY user can comment on ANY page on your site and Google don’t give you an “off” button if you don’t like it.

It’s called Sidewiki and it is a plug-in for the Google Toolbar. On the Google blog, Sidewiki is promoted as a tool where all users can add “their knowledge along the way”. But it’s already clear that brands are not seeing things quite the same way…

Continue reading “Google’s new Sidewiki kicks up a storm”

In this post I’m going to explore the concept of ‘heavy lifting’ and demonstrate how collaborating with 3rd parties can increase user interaction with your site whilst reducing development costs.

Continue reading “Heavy Lifting (save money – don’t reinvent the wheel)”

Picture: col_adamson on Flickr

How do you update your website? If you have a content management system, it will probably have some kind of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor built-in that gives you a set of controls something like this:

The basic TinyMCE toolbar

Tools like this are good because they give you a lot of control over what your content looks like, but that control and freedom comes with an important trade-off: Unlike a more restrictive system (think of a stock management system, say), it can’t tell you when something has gone wrong. Content can be formatted in so many ways and still, to the human eye, remain meaningful. Look at the example below:

Continue reading “Seeing meaning with semantic markup”

Hello. My name is Iain and I have joined Cubeworks as a Senior Developer.

Why? My entire career to date, has been delivering software that adds real value to its users; something that Cubeworks has also been doing for a long time.

How? My route to the Cubeworks family started 10 years ago.  First in London at a network management software company, then via two of the largest companies on the planet, followed by two smaller Brighton based companies.  Each one was a leader in its field.

So? Cubeworks has worked hard to foster a creative, robust and constantly improving development environment.  As a software professional, that’s something to be cherished and it shines through in the final products.

And? Like Cubeworks, I’m focused on the ALT.NET way of using Microsoft’s .NET framework; utilising the best-of-breed components and practices to maximise the quality of all the software I have a part in creating.

Cool. Yes, I think so too.

Why should you care about web technologies?

The majority of our clients do not really care what web technologies we use – unless they are technical themselves – and indeed, why should they? We are the technical experts, that’s why they engage us.  Naturally, the most important thing for them is that their website is usable, reliable and enables them to hit (or, even better, exceed) their targets.

Modern websites can be complex beasts, often talking to several other IT systems. Committing to inappropriate technologies usually means an expensive rebuild much sooner than expected, so it’s more vital than ever that the underlying technology is appropriate for the job.

Continue reading “The costly perils of the wrong technologies”

Microsoft announced this month that they will be using Windows Update to upgrade Internet Explorer 6 & 7 users to the latest release, IE8. Although Microsoft insist you will still have to opt-in to the upgrade, it will be set as ‘High Priority’ for many users, which effectively means that if you don’t want it you’ll have to opt-out. For the online world, this is a pretty big milestone in browser history: the end of IE6.

Continue reading “Upgrading from Internet Explorer 6, for fun and profit”