We swapped Cumbria for sunny beaches

Last month we swapped the mountain bikes and fells of Cumbria for the surf boards and ‘optimistically sunny’ beaches of Cornwall. We made arrangements for an office in a peaceful little village away from the main tourist areas with a short drive away from some of the best surfing beaches Cornwall has to offer! With a few leads in the area, our mission was to explore the opportunities available to us with local businesses and fine tune our surfing skills at the same time…win win!

We had a great time meeting new people and getting to know the Cornish take on the web industry, both from how potential clients approached our ideas and how local web businesses worked creatively. It has to be said over the past few years Cumbria has made great strides from an client education point of view and professionalism from agencies has improved greatly too. We still hear of horror stories and free pitching still happens but its definitely much less than it did 5 years ago in Cumbria. In Cumbria it seems collectively we’re doing a better job of educating our clients and it has made a marked improvement in the last couple years on the way local businesses understand and how they approach web project.

This was one of the main differences we found with Cornwall, despite a lot of the local work being pretty similar to the Lake District (tourist related, hotels and B&Bs), they’re a little ahead in terms of knowing how the web can help their business. Pretty much every client we had the opportunity to see over the 2 weeks approached the project with a clear brief, realistic budget and honest objectives for the partnership with their web company.

The love of the Lake District is still a little too much to consider a relocation and we’re definitely moving in the right direction here, but it was good to see how the other side of the country get it done!
A successful trip that gave us a few more project wins and we still managed to hone our surfing skills, all in all a great trip!

Now to think up our next Remedy adventure…

Sean

Optimising your website for mobile

We’ve been getting an increasing amount of requests for mobile websites recently and as such we’ve now started offering this service. The amount of people viewing websites via a mobile phone is sky rocketing with half of all local searches performed on a mobile device so it really does make sense to optimise your website for mobile phones.

Most of the time we’ve been recommending optimising websites using CSS media queries, this basically means that your current site stays exactly the same as it is currently but when it’s viewed on a mobile device additional CSS is loaded in which restructures the page to make it mobile friendly. This means that you don’t need to rewrite all of your content and source new photography as the mobile version uses exactly the same content! This makes optimising your website for the web extremely easy and doesn’t require massive amounts of time or budget.

We use the following CSS to detect when a user is on a mobile browser:

@media handheld and (max-width: 480px), screen and (max-device-width: 480px), screen and (max-width: 600px), only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)

We then ensure all images and content are scaled down to a sensible width so that the user has as little horizontal scrolling to do as possible.

You can see how this works on a site we recently launched for the European Outdoor Group, http://www.europeanoutdoorgroup.com.

We’ve also recently optimised http://www.michael-cl-hodgson.co.uk/ and http://www.investinsouthlakeland.co.uk/, note we didn’t design or develop these sites.

New Adventures in Web Design Conference 2012

So we’ve just about recovered from the New Adventures in Web Design Conference in Nottingham about 2 weeks ago. We had an excellent time and came away feeling even more excited about the work we’re doing at Remedy. The conference and workshops were well organised by Simon Collison and Greg Wood, huge thanks to them for keeping our relatively new and ever-developing industry moving forward in the right direction.

Bunch of excellent speakers at this years conference were Dan Mall, Naomi Atkinson, Travis Schmeisser, Robbie Manson, Trent Walton, Cameron Koczon, Denise Jacobs and Frank Chimero.

The main theme of this years conference was about using our skills together as web designers and developers for the greater good. How could we use what we do to make a difference in the world? Stand out speakers for me were Trent Walton and Naomi Atkinson on this topic. I also particularly enjoyed Cameron Koczons take on this approach but driving home that ultimately making money is what we do. Changing the world doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t able to run a successful business. This got me thinking of what we do at Remedy and the few side project ideas we already have that need to develop further this year, watch this space! Definitely got me more exciting about our industry and making the world a better place through web design.

Overall the event was excellent and we would recommend it to anyone. The whole experience was a casual, friendly environment with like-minded business owners, freelancers and in-house teams. What we’ve taken away from it is that we are the ones shaping our industry in these critical early years as the creative web sector matures and becomes a part of everyones lives. Events like New Adventures in Web Design is one of those conferences that is driving the thought process forward and helps to keep everyone in the same frame of mind, thinking about how we develop together into the future.

European Outdoor Group redesign won!

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve won the job to redesign the European Outdoor Group’s website. So far the process has gone very smoothly, we’ve presented an initial concept to the team who are all as excited as us about the new look.

The site is due for launch in January so watch this space!

iPhone icons

We thought it was about time we added a cool little iPhone icon, these work in a very similar way to favicons (the little icons you see next to website addresses).

After a little playing around we discovered that the icons on the non retina (iPhone 1 – 3) screen are 57x57pixels however it works best to create your icons a little larger at 158×158 pixels, the iPhone then scales it down making it nice and crisp. What’s especially nice is that the iPhone automatically adds a little transparent highlight fitting them in nicely with all your other applications. Making them at this larger size also means that your icon will still look crisp on the new retina displays found on the iPhone 4.

How to create your own:

1. Create an image 158x158pixels
2. Save it as apple-touch-icon.png
3. Upload it to the root of your server (optional: If you want to specify an icon at a different path, or filename, use a Link tag in the of your page:  )
4. Enjoy

So what are you waiting for, add us to your iPhone homepage now

This article was originally posted on Torchbox.com