Monday is expected to be the busiest online shopping day of the year, as consumers get ready for Christmas.

Tens of thousands of pounds are expected to be spent online every minute throughout the day, on what has been termed ‘Mega Monday’. Video games, gadgets and DVDs are amongst the most popular purchases.

BBC article

If you’re interested in how to boost your sales over the holiday period, feel free to contact us in regards to optimising your existing website for search engines.

Alternatively, if you want to discuss e-commerce web design in general, please take a look at some of the articles we have on the topic!

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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 <p>, <div> and <span> 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.

• <article> – Defines a main article on a page. Can include cite (citation) and pubdate (publishing date) attributes.
• <details> – 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.
• <figcaption> – States the caption for a figure as defined by the figure tag.
• <figure> – Usually used to group a set of elements.
• <footer> – Footer layout element. This is used to contain the footer content of the page, usually contains the website name, author and copyright information.
• <header> – 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.
• <hgroup> – A tag used to group together heading tags such as <h1>, <h2>, <h3> and so on.
• <keygen> – A key generation tag which defines a generated (encryption) key that can be associated with a HTML form.
• <meter> – The <meter> tag contains content which is deemed to be a measurement of some sort.
• <nav> – The <nav> tags stands for navigation and is designed to surround navigation links, such as those present in a sidebar bar or navigational header/footer.
• <summary> – The <summary> tag defines the title of a <details> element.
• <time> – 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.

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“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.

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The new web design of Body Sculpt UK features an entirely custom web design, templating and integration into both existing and brand new textual content. The new website design also features the use of a dynamic blog system to go alongside the static content of the main site. Links also exist to various social networking and social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter allowing easy promotion of the the Body Sculpt brand.

Body Sculpt UK have been working with us at Rapid Web for several years now, and we are delighted to see them continue to work with us into the new development of their brand and website.

If you’re interested in getting a new web design for your website, feel free to give us a call on 01785 250222 or contact us directly.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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This also appears to be a slight re-brand of the Google logo as well. The Google logo in these screen shots are noticeably less bevelled than the current logo and is without the drop shadow on the existing logo.

Google Experimental New Logo Design – March 2010

New Google Web Design – Search Engine Results Page – March 2010

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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.

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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!

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