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Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated Mobile Pages – The Future of Mobile Development?

Today, Google has released their proof-of-concept for their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, which has already been implemented by over 30 different online publishers, such as the BBC, the Daily Mail and Mashable as well as several distribution platforms such as WordPress.com and Pinterest.

The basis of this technology is to take a news article, or any kind of webpage and strip it down to the basics, and make it load as fast as possible. This is achieved by stripping the pages bare of anything that will cause excessive load times on a mobile, limiting what the page is capable of displaying, as well as pre-loading elements before the page appears. This limit doesn’t effect the actual content being provided, just removes all the unnecessary items such as JavaScript calls or vast amounts of CSS. This doesn’t mean that you’re left with a blank page of just text though. One of Google’s major points in this is to allow the content that is displayed on your site to still display on the mobile, including videos direct from YouTube or advertising, which is often lost by the time a page fully loads.

What does this mean for us? Well, it means that we will be developing sites that are starting to use this. All of our WordPress sites will be fully supported, and our own CMS will also be following suit soon. This means that any new site we build will be keeping up with some of the biggest online publishers in the world.

The Importance of Responsive Design

How are you viewing this post today? I don’t mean ‘what browser are you using?’, I’m interested in what device you are viewing this post from. If I’d asked this question just a handful of years ago, it would have been a fair bet that you were using a desktop or laptop computer and that might well still be the case today. However, now there are more options for you to choose from: tablet, smart phone, smart TV, games console, the list is growing. The point is, the options today for internet browsing are many and varied, especially when compared with trends over the last decade.

With these movements in internet browsing, trends in website design must move also. The ‘classic’ website (and by classic, I’m really talking about sites designed within the last ten years) had a standard width of 960 pixels (the little squares that make up the pictures on our devices’ screens). This width was generally accepted as the standard resolution of the majority of screens in those days. Before long, wide-screen monitors began to fall into common use and as developers it was up to us to accommodate these wider resolutions. Again, the commonly accepted practice was to keep the sites using a fixed width of 960 pixels, which on wider screens would become a fixed central column. Now we had websites that looked good both on ‘standard’ and wide displays. Continue reading →

Twitter targeted advertising

Twitter launched a new platform last month for companies to hit customers with targeted advertising, using algorithms to sniff out important words that supposedly interpret what the tweet maker wants or desires.

In an example posted Wednesday by Twitter revenue manager Nipoon Malhotra; if you tweet that you are listening to a band that happens to have a concert coming up in your city, the concert’s venue could send a Promoted Tweet into your Twitter Timeline with a link to buy tickets.

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A picture is worth?

Infographics and marketing

A picture is worth a thousand words, that’s so true in a world where time is now a resource that very few can afford to waste. Getting as much information to your potential customer as quickly as possible is vital.
Say hello to a marketing tool that you will learn to love called infographics.

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Cool tech for 2014

Technology is getting ready to make us all go wow this year.

Here are a few of the best bits to look forwards to.

Formula E

Just as sexy as F1 but battery powered, these cars are due to get racing around the cities of the world in September 2014. They are expected to be a little slower at around 155 mph but add them to some spectacular street circuits and the excitement will be electric, sorry. Oh and the batteries only last 20 minutes so instead of changing tires the drivers will be changing cars in the pit stops. Should be interesting. Continue reading →