When I’m not creating websites, I’m usually out there droning. Check out my latest video below, shot in Cofton Park, Birmingham, UK.
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That’s right, I now accept Bitcoin as a payment method for my web design and development services! I could stop this post there, but I will use this time to discuss Bitcoin a bit further and why I accept it as a payment method.
Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, and it’s here to stay with it’s current value at £12,000 at the time of writing (15:02 – December 7th 2017). Although some are still skeptical about its future, many are positive after seeing it rise in value by 1899.19% this year alone. It can be used to purchase just about anything; including every day items, property, vehicles, and more. As it grows in popularity every day, the choice of where it can be spent will continue to grow. Click here to learn more about Bitcoin.
I’ve chosen to accept it as a form of payment for a number of reasons. Firstly, transaction time is only a matter of seconds, so there’s no waiting for funds to clear. Secondly, there is no transaction fee payable by either party, as it isn’t controller by a bank or central authority – it’s completely independant. Lastly, it’s the future and it’s here to stay – so why not embrace it?
Bitcoin can be purchased from various exchanges and websites, but the most reliable is Coinbase. From there, Bitcoin can be held in your own wallet, or sent elsewhere.
I spend a lot of time on Instagram, both from a professional and personal perspective. I love the photo sharing platform, as well as Instagram’s Stories feature. A lot of my Instagram browsing time is spent either checking out photos of cool desks and work setups, or looking through some awesome designs created by fellow web designers.
Below, I’ve put together a list of the five best Instagram accounts which any web designer should follow for inspiration:
- @welovewebdesign – https://www.instagram.com/welovewebdesign/
- @webdesignit – https://www.instagram.com/webdesignit/
- @dailywebdesign – https://www.instagram.com/dailywebdesign/
- @web_design_pin – https://www.instagram.com/web_design_pin/
- @rocketz.folio – https://www.instagram.com/rocketz.folio/
Top5s approached me during the summer to rebuild their website from the ground up, and migrate all of their content from their old platform. With well over 2 million subscribers on YouTube, it’s important that the Top5s website is robust and user friendly, amongst other things. The new website has proven to be a success, and we will continue working hard to innovate the website and bring new features and content to the ever growing Top5s audience. Top5s left the following testimonial:
“After having a very unprofessional web design service with a previous company, I searched around for the best person to rebuild our website and take it to the next level. After coming across James I can honestly say he has been fantastic. Everything from communication to his input on what would make the site more appealing for our visitors. The passion and professionalism really shows in his work and I couldn’t recommended him more highly.”
Check out their announcement video below, and click here to view their website:
The website is built on WordPress, using a custom developed theme.
I’m a regular user of Instagram, and I’ve managed to build up a good following over the past couple of years I’ve been using it for by posting good photos and interacting with others. Recently though, I created a way to automate the interaction part of my account by creating a robot.
How the robot works is by automatically liking certain photos on hashtags related to my account. For example, it will automatically like hundreds of photos a day with the hashtags #webdesign, #webdevelopment, and more. In turn, this spreads your name across the Instagram network and gets people looking at your profile – which in a lot of cases results in them liking your photos and following you.
However, the robot can do so much more. It can automatically follow users, unfollow users, comment on photos, send private messages, and so on. I chose not to do this on my account because I like to control these things myself (not let a robot do it for me). I have used these techniques on other business accounts which are now gaining thousands of followers each month.
If you’d like access to the robot to grow your following, just email me your Instagram username to hello@jamesdowen.com and we can discuss further.
Over the years as a web designer and developer, I’ve come across a number of different websites and resources that assist with productivity and inspiration. Below is a list of the top 10 websites I think you should take a look at if you’re web designer and/or developer. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a professional who’s been in the industry for years – I’m confident you’ll enjoy looking through the below:
1) GitHub
Mainly for developers, GitHub isn’t just great for collaborating on projects where multiple developers are involved. I am often the only developer on a project and use GitHub as a tool to backup my code.
2) Wunderlist
This website/app is great for writing todo lists. I use this not only for my working life, but to also keep my personal life on track. It’s pretty similar to the many other todo list apps in existence, but the elegant design drawn me towards this one.
3) Codrops
While great for many things including news and resources, my favourite part of Codrops is their how-to articles and demos. There are a tonne of beautiful CSS experiments and examples on there that any designer or developer could embrace
This site does not publish articles itself, but rather curates them from other trusted sites. It’s great resource for easily hunting down the latest news in the industry.
This had to be included really. My go to platform for any development or programming related problem.
6) Scotch
A library of super well written articles and tutorials on all things web dev.
7) CodyHouse
Pretty much the same reason as Codrops but different experiments.
8) Asana
Perfect for managing multiple ongoing projects. You can add tasks, sub tasks, attachments, assigned to other people if working in a team, etc.
9) CSS Winner
Awards are given every day to well designed websites. Browsing through the award winners tends to give you great design inspiration for your next website.
Full of coding news, tutorials, tips, and more. Reading this daily will sure help to keep you in the know.
A website is important to any business. It is a customers first port of call when they require information, potential customers visit your website to find out more, and for a lot of people their website is even their primary income source. But when you are getting a new website, or completely revamping your current one, there’s a lot to consider.
There’s often some things that people fail to consider which may have negative impacts on the website in the near future…
1) Is my website responsive?
A responsive website (or mobile and tablet friendly as some may call it) is important today as it will accommodate the ever growing mobile user-base. Over half of internet traffic comes from a mobile device, and if your new website is not suitable for browsing on a mobile device, then potential customers will most likely leave the site.
2) Website Hosting
You’ll find there’s often very cheap web hosting available for as little as £1.99 per month. While this seems good on paper, I’ve seen many people become let down over the years by poor service levels, resulting in a lot of downtime for their site. 100% uptime of your websites server is a necessity. If someone visits your website while it’s down, stats show that 87% will not return again.
3) Social Media Integration
This is expected by most today, therefore making it mandatory that your site users can easily interact with you on social media via your website. Whether this be links to your social media profiles so you can easily be found, or embedding social feeds, site visitors expect to be able to find this information easily.
4) Security
I once worked at an agency who mainly built WordPress websites for their clients. While this wasn’t an issue in the short term, the longer term often seen plugins and themes not kept up to date – causing security vulnerabilities to appear. Sites would often be attacked with spam comments, spam links, technical errors and so on; not a great look for those visiting your site. This can easily be prevented by keeping site and server software up to date, or using secure programming methods if going down the bespoke route.
5) Content
It used to be said that content was king. Although things have changed on the web over the years, this still appears to be the case in most cases. It’s important that all text is unique and not copy/pasted from another website. Doing this will flag your website as duplicate content to search engines, thus resulting in a possible site ban and loss of traffic. Duplicate content isn’t the only worry though; content must be engaging and of a high quality.
This is just a handful of five factors to consider when creating your new website. The list could go into the hundreds, and it varies from site to site. A small business site would have less factors than a large-scale ecommerce website.
Loading speed is still a common issue for many websites from small to big today. If your website takes longer than 2 seconds to load, then it most people will leave your website and go elsewhere without a second thought – and will never again return to your website.
There’s also another consequence to slow loading times, Google are now using loading times as a ranking factor on search results. So, if your competitors have faster loading times, then chances are there website could rank higher than yours in search engine results – potentially costing you a great amount of traffic. Below are some quick ways of increasing your loading times with .htaccess:
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# Enable GZIP compression <IfModule mod_gzip.c> mod_gzip_on Yes mod_gzip_dechunk Yes mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$ mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$ mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.* mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.* mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.* mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.* </IfModule> # mod_deflate AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript # enable keep-alive <ifModule mod_headers.c> Header set Connection keep-alive </ifModule> |
If you’d like help doing this on your own website, then please do contact me.
PHPStorm is my IDE of choice for all web based projects as it provides an easy to use development environment for all of the technologies I use – especially PHP.
It also comes fully equipped with plenty of shortcuts to make life easier, of which three can be found below:
CTRL-D – Duplicate the current selected line.
Instead of writing out full HTML, generate it using Emmet (already built into PHPStorm). Simply type as below and press tab.
CTRL-Shift-F – Find/replace a phrase in your entire project.
So many of us (myself included) have been waiting a long time for Apple to update the MacBook Pro range – with the last major update been back in 2012. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro model myself, but it’s in dire need of an update and I’ve been patiently waiting for Apple to announce something new.
There’s rumours around the web claiming that the new model will feature an OLED display (amongst other things). Take a look at the OLED design concepts by Martin Hajek below:
