Jargon Buster: Ruby on Rails Web Development

by on April 2, 2012 in Jargon Buster, Web Design / Development

Bespoke web applications are complex pieces of software. Previously, they would take teams of programmers and designers to develop. In recent years though, clever web application frameworks have sprung up that automate the production of repeatable ‘boilerplate’ code and emphasise techniques like ‘convention over configuration’ to keep application code lean and maintainable. Ruby on Rails is the best of these web application frameworks.
The Ruby on Rails logo

Ruby on Rails

Using Ruby on Rails, big, complex web apps can be rapidly built by small teams with minimum overhead whilst keeping things easily maintainable in the long run. This keeps your initial development costs low and up-keep to a minimum. Also, because all the code is created to spec, you have enormous control over scaling the application as it grows.

Sound like a panacea? Well, actually, it pretty much is. Ruby on Rails is that good! It works beautifully with other technologies too, should you have a specific requirement that is better served by another very specialised piece of software. It’s really only suited to new web apps though, or an existing web app that you are prepared to rebuild from the ground up – it’s not something that can be shoe-horned into an existing site.

Ruby on Rails is the framework powering sites like Twitter, Basecamp, Scribd, Crazy Egg, Shopify and Hulu.

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Moortor Design Sells Out

by on April 1, 2012 in Chatter, Web Design / Development

Moortor Design Ltd. has been bought by Microsoft. We will be converting our development machines to Windows 7 based PCs and are building a little shrine to Steve Ballmer. Goodbye Ruby on Rails, hello ASP.NET!

The Microsoft logo

Microsoft - mediocrity in software

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Jargon Buster: Web design with jQuery

by on March 26, 2012 in Jargon Buster, Web Design / Development

The Jargon Buster series of posts are intended to demystify the murky topic of web technologies. Looking for a web designer or web developer can be a bit of a lottery if you don’t know much about the technologies involved (which change constantly!). Hopefully this post – and others like it – will go some way to empowering you to make the right choice of web partner. Of course, we’d love it if you chose Moortor Design!

The following is taken from the Moortor Design Ltd. website (see here). It’s a bit of an explanation of the programming language jQuery – a web technology jargon word you might hear bandied around.

These days, it takes more than some nice content and a natty design to get one up on your competitors’ websites. Slick interactions, speed and a great user experience are the name of the game. jQuery helps us achieve all these things.

The jQuery logo

jQuery - Write less, do more

If HTML and CSS are the meat and potatoes of web development, Javascript is the garnish. HTML is used to describe the content of a webpage and CSS is used to describe how that content looks. Javascript is a programming language that web browsers understand that can be used to manipulate HTML and CSS based on input provided by the person browsing the webpage.

jQuery is a library of Javascript functions that can be called upon and combined to perform complex actions in the browser, based on defined behaviours that the user can trigger. These actions can be performed without having to reload the webpage from the server, meaning they occur much faster than they would otherwise.

jQuery (and the underlying Javascript) can be used to manipulate a webpage’s HTML and CSS in all manner of ways. These are most often used to improve usability and the user experience, but can also be used for purely aesthetic effect. For example, on this website the ‘parallax’ effect created by the wallpaper moving at a different speed to the speed at which you scroll is created using jQuery to animate the background based on the speed at which you operate the mouse scroll wheel.

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Special Offer: FREE Business Card Design

by on March 22, 2012 in Graphic Design, Special Offers

Moortor Design Ltd. special launch offer…

FREE business card design

Free business card design

Free business card design

For a limited time, to celebrate the launch of Moortor Design Ltd., we are offering FREE business card design. All you have to do is pay to get them printed.

Prices for printing start at £40 for 500 business cards. That’s just 8p for a professionally designed business card that will help you stand out against your competitor’s run-of-the mill cards designed by a printer, not a designer.

Rather get the cards printed yourself? That’s fine. We’ll still design your card and prepare print-ready artwork for FREE.

Why would we do that? I know you’ll appreciate the quality of the work we produce and see the benefit of getting your business’s stationery  designed by a specialist design company that provides exemplary service. Once you’re confident in working with Moortor Design Ltd. you’ll want to come back again and again.

The free service doesn’t include logo design. You must have an existing logo we can work with to qualify for the free design service. If you don’t have an existing logo, we would love to work with you to create one and help brand your business.

Prices exclude VAT. Business cards attract VAT at the standard rate (currently 20%).

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National Trust Roll-up Banner

by on March 22, 2012 in Graphic Design, Portfolio

Just finished a quick job to design an roll-up banner for the National Trust…

National Trust Trelissick Roll-up Banner

National Trust Trelissick Roll-up Banner

 

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Jargon Buster: Web Design using Responsive Design

by on March 22, 2012 in Jargon Buster, Web Design / Development

The Jargon Buster series of posts are intended to demystify the murky topic of web technologies. Looking for a web designer or web developer can be a bit of a lottery if you don’t know much about the technologies involved (which change constantly!). Hopefully this post – and others like it – will go some way to empowering you to make the right choice of web partner. Of course, we’d love it if you chose Moortor Design!

The following is taken from the Moortor Design Ltd. website (see here). It’s a bit of an explanation of responsive design – a web technology jargon word you might hear bandied around.

Cut development costs and simplify maintenance of your website whilst offering content to the widest variety of devices – desktop computers, iPads and other tablets, iPhones, Android phones and other smart phones and even ‘dumb’ phones.

An iMac, an iPad and an iPhone

Responsive design allows us to write content once that will display on a variety of devices

Responsive design is a new technique in web design that combines a number of advancements in CSS3. In particular, it uses ‘media queries’ to detect the width of the user’s browser window (viewport) and display the website’s content in a manner most suited to that size. Viewport size is the principal difference between browsing a website on a 19″ monitor and a 3.5″ phone screen.

So using responsive design enables us to serve the same content to multiple devices, rather than having to produce a whole new website for each device and duplicate the content (which then needs to be kept in sync). With responsive design we have one codebase to manage, making development easier and cheaper and maintenance quicker.

This website was developed using responsive design principles. To see it in action first make sure your browser isn’t in full screen mode, then drag one of the corners to resize the window. As it changes size, you will see the website content reorganise itself to make best use of the available space.

Why is responsive design important? By the end of August 2011, the Office for National Statistics discovered that a staggering 45% of internet users used a mobile phone to access the internet (view stats). This doesn’t even take into account users accessing the internet on tablets or other devices, which is a market that is growing. Can you afford to ignore half of your customers?

If you’re interested in applying responsive design principles to your website and making your content available on the widest variety of devices, get in contact with us at Moortor Design Ltd.

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Jargon Buster: Web Development with HTML5

by on March 15, 2012 in Jargon Buster, Web Design / Development

The Jargon Buster series of posts are intended to demystify the murky topic of web technologies. Looking for a web designer or web developer can be a bit of a lottery if you don’t know much about the technologies involved (which change constantly!). Hopefully this post – and others like it – will go some way to empowering you to make the right choice of web partner. Of course, we’d love it if you chose Moortor Design!

The following is taken from the Moortor Design Ltd. website (see here). It’s a bit of an explanation of HTML5 – a fancy acronym and a web technology jargon word you might hear bandied around.

HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It’s a sister technology to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The two technologies combined define a ‘webpage’ as delivered to you by your web browser.

  • The HTML language describes the content of a webpage
  • The CSS language describes how that content looks

Separating style and content has many advantages, not least of which is that we can construct webpages simply by defining their content (which at the end of the day is the most important thing). Because the content doesn’t need to be described in terms of the way it looks, it can instead be described semantically. That is, based on the meaning it is supposed to convey.

Google and its spiders (those robot insects that scour the web analysing webpages) are very, very clever. However, like any automaton outside of Bladerunner, they’re unable to determine meaning from the words us humans write. If, however, our content has been marked-up semantically, we are helping Google better understand the true intent of the site and hence rank it more accurately.

The 5th version of the HTML language (HTML5), is quickly being adopted by all current browsers. Even those slow on the up-take (Internet Explorer anyone?) can easily be made to understand the new features of HTML5. These new features give us web designers and developers a greater ability to build websites full of semantic richness.

The ‘Semantic Web’ as it has become affectionately known, is going to become more and more important in the months and years to come. Why not future-proof your website now?

HTML5 also contains a raft of new features that include: letting us embed video and audio natively into webpages (no need for Flash), manipulating the browser’s history, drawing graphics directly onto the page and animating them (again, no need for Flash) and tailoring sites to devices with different input methods (eg. a form for entering your telephone number can automatically flip your smartphone’s keyboard into number input mode).

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Jargon Buster: Web Development and CSS3

by on March 10, 2012 in Jargon Buster, Web Design / Development

The Jargon Buster series of posts are intended to demystify the murky topic of web technologies. Looking for a web designer or web developer can be a bit of a lottery if you don’t know much about the technologies involved (which change constantly!). Hopefully this post – and others like it – will go some way to empowering you to make the right choice of web partner. Of course, we’d love it if you chose Moortor Design!

The following is taken from the Moortor Design Ltd. website (see here). It’s a bit of an explanation of CSS3 – a fancy acronym and a web technology jargon word you might hear bandied around.

CSS3 has been around for a while now (in internet terms!). It’s no longer ‘bleeding edge’ but it’s still at least the ‘cutting edge’ of the internet’s static presentational layer. But what is CSS and why is CSS3 such an improvement?

CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s a sister technology to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). The two technologies combined define a ‘webpage’ as delivered to you by your web browser.

  • The HTML language describes the content of a webpage
  • The CSS language describes how that content looks

Separating content and styling has huge advantages. If, for example, we decide to change the way titles look, we only need to change a single definition in our CSS, rather than scouring the website for every instance of a title and changing the styling information embedded in the HTML.

Separating content and styling also means we can deliver a different look and feel for different devices with a single code-base for the site’s content. Rather than having to maintain different codebases for desktop computers, tablets, smartphones and ‘dumb’ phones, we can use ‘media queries’ (which are a part of CSS3), to detect the devices screen width and serve up a design that is tailored specifically to that device. This saves you money in the short-term (whilst your site is being developed) and massively lowers the maintenance overhead of your digital presence. Find out more about this by reading about ‘responsive design’.

The latest version of CSS (CSS3) goes way beyond this though, and brings us the ability to render complex effects on elements of a webpage. Where previously we would have had to use images and a variety of ‘interesting’ hacks to render things like drop shadows, rounded corners and text embossing, we can now do most things using native CSS3. With no images to download, pages can load quicker; and with wide support across browsers, web designs are much more consistent from one user’s machine to another.

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Hello World

by on March 1, 2012 in Chatter

In programmer speak “Hello World” is the traditional greeting made by an application to prove it’s up and running. Which is appropriate for the first post of the new Moortor Design blog!

For those of you who aren’t geeks and don’t speak “733t” (another programmer in-joke), may I simple say:

Welcome

This blog is a home for commentary on design, the web, online marketing and the wonderful county of Cornwall by Moortor Design Ltd.

Moortor Design provide branding, graphic design, web design, web development and online marketing services to businesses in Cornwall, Devon and across the South West. Based in Liskeard in South East Cornwall we are especially keen to work with businesses in Liskeard, Bodmin, Plymouth, Callington, St. Austell and other nearby areas.

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