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Alberon Newsletter – April 2013
In this newsletter:
- Case study – Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre (responsive website)
- Article – What is a CMS (Content Management System)?
- Case study – Reading Phoenix Choir (website)
- Article – An introduction to WordPress
How to use Typography effectively: Selecting typefaces or fonts.
When designing a website, fonts and typography often fall down the priority list to colours and other visual elements, yet font and typography can have a significant affect on both the look and the messages that a page conveys.
This article will introduce you to different types of fonts, and where you could use them. I will then go on to explain the relationships between different fonts so you can make the most of them with your designs. Read more
Improving your website through design
We often receive the question “how can I get thousands of hits to my website per month?”
While driving high traffic to your website is important, it remains just as important to keep your visitors returning.
The main reason for this article is to consider what design changes, small and large, you can make to create a visually pleasing, highly usable website that your visitors will continue returning to.
I will suggest ideas you can implement to help improve the design, colour and readability of your website. Read more
An Introduction to Usability
Business websites have a number of goals, but more often than not you will find these two:
- Drive more traffic to the website
- Increase the number of conversions the website creates.
In other words, they want the website to work for them.
If there is one thing other than marketing that will help increase conversions, it’s usability.
Usability is all about looking at your website and figuring out how usable it is. You might ask questions like:
- Do your visitors easily find the content they are after?
- Do they drop off halfway through filling out a form?
- Are the total visits to key pages very low?
It boils down to this question – Is your website easy to use?
Without a usable website, all of your marketing efforts in driving traffic will be worthless as people will get to your website, get frustrated and leave. Read more
An introduction to WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world.
It started out in 2003 as a simple blogging platform based on the weblog software called b2/cafelog.
Since 2003, it has grown into a content management system capable of running some extremely complex websites.
This article will introduce you to WordPress and some of the benefits of the system. Read more
What is a CMS (Content Management System)?
A CMS is a system that allows you, as a non-technical user, to easily manage the content of your website, without needing to learn anything advanced (such as HTML).
Most CMSs are web-based. That means you use your web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox) to edit the website – you don’t need to download any special software, and you can log in from any computer.
Within the CMS you can add new content, edit existing content, upload files, and so on. It’s usually not much more complex than Microsoft Word!
What are the advantages of using a CMS?
The biggest advantage is you no longer need to go back to your web developer every time you need a small change to be made to the website. This means your ongoing costs are lower, turnaround time is much faster, and you are more likely to keep your website up-to-date.
Alberon Newsletter – December 2012
In this newsletter:
- Introduction to responsive design and it’s benefits
- Paul Adams will be covering for Remya while she is away on maternity leave
- Case study - Dragon School, Oxford (responsive website)
- Wishing you a very Merry Christmas
Benefits of Responsive Web Design (RWD)
A ‘Responsive’ website, as the name may suggest responds and adapts to a device’s screen size to give you a more pleasant viewing experience and a general increase in usability. No matter what device you are choosing to browse the Internet from, the website will always maintain a clean, user-friendly consistency.
With over 1 billion smartphone users at large, the need to have a compatible website is more important than it has ever been. Mobile web browsing has been predicted to surpass desktop browsing by the year 2014 after years of rapid growth (ref Mary Meeker). Any business with an online presence should be thinking about these statistics and using them to their advantage. Read more
Introduction to responsive web design
You have probably heard the term responsive web design – but what exactly does it mean?
A responsive web design changes and adapts to fit with different screen and browser sizes. Over the past few years there has been an explosion in demand for different smartphones, tablets and notebooks. Each of these devices has its own browser size, screen resolution, and orientations.
This trend is unlikely to go away – experts predict that mobile browsing is expected to overtake desktop-based access within the next few years. Designers are faced with a greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever before. Users are expecting their web experience to translate on to each of the devices they use. Read more
Alberon Newsletter – October 2012
In this newsletter:
- Social media – recent changes to LinkedIn company pages
- The Alberon team continues to grow
- Case studies:
- University College London (Cromis 2 project)
- Gaught Conlon
