Chicubes is a website I first built back in 2008. 2010 meant it was time for a design refresh to reflect the growth of the company.
The basis for the store is Cubecart. However, besides created a completely bespoke ’skin’ for the store, I’ve added lots of jQuery to add enhanced functionality and done quite a bit of search engine optimisation with the site to provide better Google rankings. (more…)
I’m extremely encouraged that the calls for companies to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6 are intensifying. If you’re reading in the UK, there’s now an online petition to register your feelings on Microsoft’s crippled and ageing browser (it was released in summer 2001 no less). If your outside the UK, sign the Twitter based equivalent.
IE6 is both slow and insecure and if you’re using it as your primary browser, it’s likely your view of the world wide web is extremely limited. The motoring equivalent of driving a 1982 model car when you could have a 2010 model, complete with ABS, traction control, Air Con etc (for free)!
From a designer’s point of view, making a website Internet Explorer 6 compatible currently takes an unacceptable length of development time. Time that could be spent further improving a site for more mainstream browsers. As such I’ve taken the policy that I won’t be supporting the browser in future development work. I’d encourage other designers to discourage their clients from supporting the browser too. This means we can all look forwards to newer technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and Jquery 1.4 without the headaches of workarounds for Microsoft’s tired old browser.
In the meantime, it’s possible guide users to a different browser with a gentle warning. For example, my own site has only a handful of IE6 visitors (that’s quality readership for you) so with the imminent design refresh I’ll be implementing a Jquery based warning to IE6 users.
Use Jquery to guide users to other browsers
I’ve just done a refresh of the Mr Whippy Ice Cream website.
Mr Whippy 2009 site
Mr Whippy wanted a site that he could easily add his own pages/content to without having to contact a developer every time. So the site has a content management system built in so he can easily add content and images of events etc into photo galaries.
I used Wordpress as the basis for the content management system (CMS) and then heavily modified an existing Wordpress theme to get the look I was after.
Since the first version of the www.mrwhippyicecream.co.uk site, it has always been popular on Google thanks to relevant page naming, pages that validate and a sitemap for robots. I’ve done further work in this area so hope to see any searches for ‘Mr Whippy Ice Cream’ see www.mrwhippyicecream.co.uk near the top of the results!
Random Pics
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