Rapid Web News

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!

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 has recently released quite a tweak to its google.com web design to a select few users. Below are a couple of screenshots of the new web design from Google. Clicking the screen shots below will show the new web design, which features more squared off search button, a highlighted sidebar on search results and a change in default link colour to a significantly lighter shade of blue.

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

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, 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!