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Web design is a discipline very much in its infancy. The web, in its commercialized form, is a little over 25 years of age - which is just about out of nappies in relation to most design disciplines (industrial design hit puberty with The Bauhaus almost 100 years ago!).

In our continuous efforts to improve our design and development practices, we have been taking on the challenge of responsive web design.

An information architect will create the structural design of a website and the process flow with a user's experience in mind. They will guide the designers, developers and clients on how best to deliver the information that a user is looking for and how to simplify tasks that you want them to complete. An information architect is involved in a website from start to finish. Post project, they look at how the user experience and conversion rate of a website can be improved.

We've recently launched the latest version of The BMC website (http://www.thebmc.co.uk) and we've had some great feedback. One of the ideas to motivate and incentivise the staff to write articles was to provide analytics for each article right in the CMS. That way they could easily see how popular their article was without having to trawl through google analytics every time.

You may or may not be familiar with the concept of tropes; according to the website devoted to such things, www.tvtropes.org, Tropes are “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.” In other words, tropes give viewers a reference point - some sort of familiarity within a story that the viewers can relate to, which underpin the rest of the story’s more explorative elements.

Once again it's time for us to up sticks and relocate the HQ of Evolutia. To be fair we're not moving very far (over the road) and we're still saying in the same science park - Manchester Science Park that we have grown up in, still it's a logistical nightmare. This will be the third office we have moved in to, and that's the beauty of staying in a business/science park, they can accommodate your growth (or decline) without having to move very far.

Apple released iOS 5 yesterday with over 200 new features.

To upgrade your iPhone 4 "Just connect your device to your Mac or PC and follow the onscreen instructions in iTunes." or so Apple will have you believe; unfortunately for the swarms of people with upgrade issues it's not quite so simple.

I've recently been developing an online EPOS system for Shade Station to use on iPads and Macs in their new flagship store and came across a few problems that I initially thought would be pretty simple to solve as "plenty of people would have done it before" but when it came to searching to see what was out there I realised that there wasn't a lot of help so I thought I'd write a quick start guide to solving a few of the common issues that might help out someone else in my place.

A consumer is not a moron. She’s your wife. Don’t insult her intelligence, and don’t shock her.

David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1981

David Ogilvy was a fairly clever chap. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of his views were so prophetic he may have been some kind of wizard.

It’s tempting for online retailers to skew the data that reflects how their customers perceive them - product reviews, service ratings, testimonials etc. The minor matter of questionable morals aside, their web presence is their own personal domain and they feel they have the power to choose what is said and how it’s presented through this channel.

JavaScript frameworks are a godsend. Before we had the likes of Prototype, MooTools and jQuery doing anything in JavaScript was tedious and painstaking. So tedious and painstaking that unless it wasn't anything more complicated than hiding an element I probably wouldn't have bothered.

I have recently started the development of a social networking site for gamers. The designs for Gameaface - as christened by our client - are complete and signed off ready to be coded. Building the site on top of a social networking framework makes sense, but which framework to use.

After looking through various frameworks, the two main choices are Elgg and Social Engine. Elgg is open source. Social Engine matches the features that we need better than Elgg.

Google have recently announced that they will be enforcing their new Google Product specification and policy changes on the 22nd September 2011.

What this means for anyone who feeds products up to Google's Merchant Centre is that if your feed does not comply by the 22nd September, Google will take action against you, most likely rejecting your feed and removing your products from the Merchant Centre.

Google recently added reporting of site speed to Analytics and further to Tom Critchlow's post Google Analytics Now Tracks Page Load Speed, I have looked at the implications, use and shortfalls of the new site speed stats.

Adding site speed metrics into Analytics implies that Google is going to give more weight to site speed in its ranking algorithm. Even if this doesn't happen, site speed has a big effect on the number of page views, time spent on site and conversion rate (see SITE SPEED FOR DUMMIES by Craig Bradford).