Rapid Web News » Website Design

HTML 5 Content Tags

Jordan Hall — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:54:14 +0000

HTML 5 introduces several new tags which focus of defining the content of a page in a machine readable fashion.

In today’s websites, if a computer program attempts to pick out a particular part of a page, such as the main article, the sidebar or the top navigation, it would have difficulty. This is because every website structures its HTML differently, and most modern websites use

and tags to surround their content. These tags generally define style. The new HTML 5 tags define content.

Defining content makes websites easier to parse by computer programs. This could benefit accessibility readers for the blind and allow content aggregating systems and ‘mash-up’ websites to easily parse, link to and cite your articles.

Here is a list of some of the HTML 5 tags that define content.

– Defines a main article on a page. Can include cite (citation) and pubdate (publishing date) attributes.
– States content details for a specific section. Can include an open attribute defining whether or not the details within are visible to the end-user.
– States the caption for a figure as defined by the figure tag.
– Usually used to group a set of elements.
– Footer layout element. This is used to contain the footer content of the page, usually contains the website name, author and copyright information.
– Header layout element. This tag is designed to contain the top header of a document, usually showing the website logo, page and/or company title and subtitle.
– A tag used to group together heading tags such as
,
,
and so on.
– A key generation tag which defines a generated (encryption) key that can be associated with a HTML form.
– The tag contains content which is deemed to be a measurement of some sort.
– The
tags stands for navigation and is designed to surround navigation links, such as those present in a sidebar bar or navigational header/footer.
– The
tag defines the title of a
element.
– This tags contains content which is a statement or measurement of time and/or date/time.

More information about HTML 5 tags is available from W3Schools. See the HTML 5 Tag Reference for more details on these tags and the other new tags in HTML 5.

The Nudge (beta)

Jordan Hall — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:05:32 +0000

“The Nudge lets you exchange and manage brief reviews with people you know on everything that’s happening in your City, and beyond.

Let your starting point in choosing anything (from a hotel in San Francisco or a restaurant in London, to a new book or a concert in New York) be the reviews of people you know, whose opinion you trust.

The Nudge is also launching weekly City Editions for London and New York. These can be accessed through the site or subscribed to via email and will combine our favourite member recommendations with some insider knowledge of what’s new and happening in your City each week.

The Nudge will launch over the summer of 2010. If you’d like to be involved as one of the first to have access to the beta version of the site, please let us know by subscribing below.”

Rapid Web is proud to be working with The Nudge, to create a new social networking abstraction, which focuses on the recommendation of consumer products and services, dependant upon a well defined and focused network of local social knowledge.

The Nudge teaser site is now live and contains a custom made web design, a themed blog system and other dynamic contact, such as a form to allow users to sign up for the up and coming beta.

If you are interested in what The Nudge will have to offer in the future, take a look at the new blog post on The Nudge Blog, ‘Why Subscribe to Join the Nudge?‘.

To apply for The Nudge beta, just head to thenudge.com and fill in the ‘Apply for the beta’ form.

The Moira Fund

Jordan Hall — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:34:40 +0000

The Moira Fund, a grant making charity, has been established in memory of Moira Jones,

…

Following her death, family, friends and colleagues of Moira wished to establish a fund in her memory that would support others who found themselves bereaved through violent death at the hands of another.

Rapid Web have worked with the Moira Fund to produce a custom web design built upon the well established, open-source blogging platform, WordPress. The custom design was integrated into the WordPress system with images provided by the Moira Fund and involved the creation of a custom events administration and management plug-in.

Rapid Web has sponsored The Moria Fund and continues to wish them the very best in all their future fund-raising and support efforts.

To donate or find out more information about The Moria Fund, please visit The Moria Fund website.

Fantastic Specialist Sports Cars

Jordan Hall — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:13:57 +0000

At Rapid Web, we are very happy to announce the launch of the Grinnall Cars website!

Grinnall Cars manufactures specialised sports cars, trikes and kit cars, from the Scorpion III, IV to the BMW 1200CL. I would be lying if I said they did not look like tempting purchases!

For Grinnall Cars, Rapid Web put together a custom web design which was then integrated into a custom developed website. Each product featured on the Grinnall Cars website, has several related information pages and a full dynamic photo gallery.

The Grinnall Cars homepage also features a custom made Flash banner, created by one of our excellent in-house Flash developers and previews several of the top products from Grinnall Cars. The Flash animation features many aesthetically appealing visual effects such as focus blur which compliments the design and provides additional promotional information without overly distracting the end-user.

If you are interested in website design, development or Flash animation development, please feel free to browse our portfolio – Grinnall Cars being one of our newest additions!

If you wish to, please feel to get in contact with us and discuss exactly what you’d like!

Love at First Bite Cakes

Jordan Hall — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:37:59 +0000

Here at the Rapid Web offices, we all like cake. Rightly so as well, because cake is fantastic.

On a related note, we’re deliciously happy to announce the launch of the ‘Love at First Bite Cakes’ website.

Here’s a quick snippet from the website describing the personal history of Love at First Bite Cakes.

A lot of people ask me if I’ve been to college to learn my skills, but my training was more traditional… I’ve learnt them through the family business! Just before I was born my parents opened Parkside Bakery, which they owned until about 5 years ago. Most of my happiest childhood memories are being there, cleaning and helping make the cakes. When I finished school I began working at their shop in Stafford hospital making all the shop cakes (flapjack, shortbreads etc) and got creative by changing recipes and design. Eventually I moved to their main bakery as head of confectionary, helping with all food production and started making birthday cakes, with help from my dad.

Seeing how interested I was in celebration cakes, and once showing me everything he knew, he sent me around the country for a year, working for the countries top cake decorators and chocolatiers. Therefore my training was informal and experienced based. In 2006, they opened a cafe in Stafford town which I became manager of. The shop before used to sell a lot of birthday cakes, so I had a small base of customers asking me to make cakes for them, and from there my cake business grew. Within a year I had enough customers to call cake decorating a full time job!

In recent years, I have been looking for the perfect shop to move my business into, and start on my own officially, and I got the keys last week. I open ‘Love at first Bite’ in two weeks time and I can’t wait! I’ll let you know the rest as it happens…

The Love at First Bite Cakes website is a fully custom web design and template based on a provided logo which was well integrated into the desired colour theme and style. The website promotes some fantastic celebration style cakes primarily and the custom web design reflects this target audience.

We also gave Love at First Bite Cakes business specific advice in the web presence promotional fields of social networking and social media, meaning you can now follow them on Twitter, Facebook and soon flickr.

If you’re interested in putting together a fantastic website to promote your business or if you just want some advice on how to promote your existing website, feel free to get in touch. There is a lot we can help you with - take a look at our portfolio.

Rapid Web – turning cake into code.

April Fools’ Day Jokes across the Internet

Jordan Hall — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:02:11 +0000

Firstly, happy April Fools’ day to you!

There have been a crazy amount of April Fools’ jokes flying across the Internet today. Here are a few of the best from some of the biggest names.

Google Animal Translate

Google have supposedly released an ever so sneaky version of Google Translate that can translate animal noises in to English! This is a mobile application, suprisingly for the Android platform and is (not) available in the Android App Store.

Take a look at the video below or visit the ‘official’ Google Animal Translate application.

Firebox Do It Yourself Carbon Freezing Kit

Firebox is heavily known for its extravagant and crazy gadgets and gizmos. However, this one is quite a kicker – take a look at Firebox’s DIY Carbon Freezing Kit.

‘The freezing process itself is simple: just remove your clothes, lie down in the chamber, set the timer and…well, the next thing you know it’ll be 2040.’

Google goes into Nuclear Power Production

As part of a green initiative by Google, they intend to start producing super efficient nuclear power plants as soon as possible via a newly acquired company. Surely you will be able to Google Search the nuclear isotopes soon enough.

‘Google has acquired a company that has created a new process for highly efficient isotope separation, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The primary use of this technology, say experts we’ve spoken with, is uranium enrichment.

Enriched uranium is a necessary ingredient in the creation of nuclear energy, and one source we’ve spoken with at Google says that this is part of the Google Green Initiative. The company will use the new technology to enable it to design and possibly build small, mobile and highly efficient nuclear power generators. “Google has already begun building an enrichment plant,” says a high ranking IAEA source.’

Sourced from an ‘exclusive’ TechCrunch article.

ThinkGeek iCade – An Arcade Holder for the iPad

In a bit of funny move from ThinkGeek, they have released a product called the iCade, which is effectively and arcade machine shaped holder for the new Apple iPad. Over recent product releases include:

moodINQ – A programmable electronic Tattoo system
Tell Me Your Secrets Bear – A cuddly bear which had a microphone and camera allowing parents to spy on their children and their secrets.
Canned Unicorn Meat – Which is… well, exactly what it says on the tin, apparently.

Plenty more…

It is still April Fools’ Day here and as such there are plenty more April Fools’ Day jokes and pranks going on worldwide on the Internet. If and when we find more hilarious pranks, we’ll be sure to keep you up to date.

Google renames to Topeka – ‘Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.’
Google Annotation Gallery – GAG is a open source libary for Java that allows programmers to easily express their emotions in the code… ‘The Google Annotations Gallery is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves. Do you find the standard Java annotations dry and lackluster? Have you ever resorted to leaving messages to fellow developers with the @Deprecated annotation? Wouldn’t you rather leave a @LOL or @Facepalm instead? If so, then this is the gallery for you.’
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future – He’s a time traveller from the future apparently, come here to stop the LHC experiments. When asked which country he came from, he answered: “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

Happy April Fools’ Day!

New BBC Web Design

Jordan Hall — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:57:39 +0000

I previously posted about Google’s new web design, and now the BBC website is undergoing a beta web design. Take a look at the new BBC web design in the screenshot below.

Click the image above to view an enlarged screenshot. Alternatively, you can take a look at the beta BBC directly at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/

The new BBC homepage design is even heavier in JavaScript and AJAX functionality allowing for some extremely dynamic customisation of the page to any individual user’s personal preferences.

Google Buzz Welcome Screenshot

Jordan Hall — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:01:53 +0000

In an update to our previous post on Google Buzz, we now have a screenshot to show of the Google Buzz interface within Gmail. The following screenshot shows the Google Buzz Welcome screen, as shown the first time you access Google Buzz.

Google Buzz welcome screen

Facebook – New Web Design Changes

Jordan Hall — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:46:18 +0000

Facebook, one of the largest and most well known PHP powered social networking websites has made significant changes to its web design. Facebook have taken a more minimalistic web design approach in many respects, removing most of the bottom application and instant messaging bar, and moving to a left hand side bar. From a technical perspective, Facebook have increased their use of many web technologies such as JavaScript and AJAX in an effort to increase the speed of website loading and make improve the overall user experience. This certainly increases speed but can cause issues on intermittent or unreliable Internet connections, or on browsers with no or poor JavaScript support. However, Facebook has full support for Internet Explorer 7, 8, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

The left sidebar of the new web design now features links to the news feed, friends, messages, friends and Facebook applications. These applications include both built-in Facebook applications such as Photos and custom made applications such as Rapid Wish List (in the Facebook screenshot above). The sidebar also includes direct links to the top online friends in your Facebook instant messaging, providing you are signed into Facebook’s chat system, which is not the case in the screenshot shown above.

Hopefully you enjoy the new web design Facebook has adopted, but as always there are many Facebook groups which heavily dislike the new changes to the Facebook web design. This is always the case with Facebook design changes it seems. What do you think? Do you like the changes or find that they make the website more difficult to use?

If you’re interested in a new web design for your website, whether minimalist like Facebook’s new design, or much bigger and bolder, please feel free to contact us. We do web design, web development, the creation of dynamic PHP-powered web applications and search engine optimisation and much more. Take a look at some of our other work.

WordPress to Open Source UI Design

Jordan Hall — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:30:41 +0000

WordPress, possibly the most popular blogging software out there, is set to heavily open source the design of its user interface this year.

WordPress is an open source blogging solution written in PHP and powered by a MySQL database backend. Code wise, it is entirely open source and licensed in entirety under the GNU General Public License (version 2), and as of typing this, it is used by over 200 million websites worldwide.

Design in WordPress has previously relied on contest to refresh the system’s administration section header, colour schemes and icon sets. This year however, the WordPress community are looking to heavily drive the concept of open source design, with a focus on many more design contests, a dedicated WordPress user interface design blog and significantly in the way of general communication about the direction the user interface is to take. To this end, there will be the new UI design blog, a newly created WordPress UI IRC channel (#wordpress-ui on Freenode) and a more noticeable mention of WordPress design on the official WordPress mailing lists.

If you’re interested in helping to design the new user interface for WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms out there, see the original open-source design article on the official WordPress blog.

If you want more information on how you can use WordPress for your own website, or would like to see how we can integrate a WordPress powered blog into your existing website, feel free to contact us right now!