At White Hat Media, we’ve built or worked on hundreds of websites over the years, using a wide range of technologies and solutions. We’ve hand-coded and used templates, from basic HTML and CSS static stuff to PHP and ASP dynamic code. We’ve built e-commerce sites using Actinic and Zen Cart, and we’ve built Content Management System sites using all sorts of technologies and off-the-shelf packages. But in the era of open source development, we’re focusing much of our energies on Drupal.

Drupal is a free Content Management System written in PHP, and can be used for anything ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate or e-commerce sites. You can have flexible account privileges with fine grained user access levels, customisable layouts, forums, image galleries, RSS feeds, Ubercart-powered ecommerce, multi-lingual sites and much more. The key to Drupal’s success is its flexibility – Drupal offers literally thousands of plug-in modules to do almost anything you care to think of. And the best thing from White Hat Media’s point of view is that almost straight out of the box, Drupal is SEO friendly. (more…)

How do you get your web projects out the door on time and to budget? Traditional project planning harps back to the days of the pyramids some 6,000 years ago. How does that translate to today’s average web project – not too well some may say.

I recently jumped on a web project management course held by Econsultancy up in their swanky new offices in Farringdon. The main thrust of the course was based around ‘Agile’ as a methodology for managing web projects.

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If you’re looking to start up a new website to revamp your company’s image there are several factors that you should consider from the outset.

You obviously want to get the design right so that it stays in people’s minds and attracts them to stay on the site and. A design also needs to encourage visitors to buy the service or product that you are selling. (more…)

The developments of the mobile web are akin to those of the Desktop Web back in 1998 according to research conducted by Jakob Nielson in his alert box web page at www.useit.com.

Testing mobile websites through various means he found that they failed on most of the tests he worked on. For starters the sites tested were found to have very large pages with large images or long pages that were impossible to see clearly on the smaller screens of mobiles.  (more…)

Should the Queen be brushing up on her Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) procedures? It seems no one is immune to an SEO review these days.

The Daily Telegraph recently reviewed the Royal website for best SEO practices and found that they were able to pick a lot of holes in it. (more…)