Three websites in one project

Recently launched is a fantastic new website that we built for Hospitality Cornwall.

Hospitality Cornwall is a small group of quality free houses based in the Newquay area. As such, the project was essentially three websites in one, one for Hospitality Cornwall itself , one for Lewinnick Lodge and finally one for The Plume of Feathers. Phew!

The project management and design was by Approach and it was a great opportunity to work with them.

The website has been built using Joomla!, enabling the guys at Hospitality Cornwall to keep all three sections bang up to date and we were delighted to include an on-site training session to give them a headstart with this.

The joys of caching

Do you ever find that you've updated your website, or your web designer assures you that they have made the updates you requested, but when you look at your site it's the same as before? If I had a pound for every time a client has come back to me saying "I can't see the changes", well, let's just say that my piggy bank would be overflowing.

The explanation is quite simple. Your web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc.) stores the web pages that you look at, so if you go back to them they will load more quickly for you. This is referred to as 'caching'. This is lovely as it can speed up your browsing for you, however it means that you are not always necessarily seeing the most recent version of the web page.

What's your website for?

All businesses need a website these days, don't they? That's something that we strongly believe (but then we would, wouldn't we?). But do you ever think about why you need a website and what you want to get from it?

What's your website for? It might seem an obvious question, but it can be well worth some thought. What business purpose does your website serve and what do you want visitors to your website to do?

Low IQ? Switch your internet browser!

We all know that there's lies, damn lies and statistics, but there's been an eye catching story floating about that on average IE users have a lower IQ. Here's the story from a web design point of view and here's the Guardian's take on it in their Pass Notes column.

I don't think there's really that much to read into this. I'd imagine that there could be a correlation between folks who aren't that comfortable with computers (and so sticking with IE because it's preinstalled in Windows) funnily enough also not being that comfortable with taking an IQ test online. In contrast, I've certainly come across plenty of developers in my time who prefer to use IE themselves.

Having said that, I of course use Firefox and Opera!