One of the darker sides of web development is down time. The site owners don’t want it, the site developers don’t want it and most importantly the site users don’t want it. Unfortunately, however, it will happen. This is not a defeatist view or an excuse, it’s realistic.

An experienced software development team will know this and rather than bury their heads in the sand, they will be well prepared to deal with the consequences. It’s all about having the problem solving skills, tools and the right approach to solving the root cause of the problem.

Read on...

When you’re building a web application, Rails does a load of the heavy lifting for you. Many of the core philosophies of Rails are aimed around only implementing functionality in the place it makes sense.

This turns out to be a great idea for readability, and with practice – and thoughtful naming – it isn’t too difficult to keep your code clean enough that you can see at a glance what it does. You can get to the point where your controller code just gives a high-level overview of what the code does, and leaves all the details to the models and other modules.

Lots of the tools in a Rails developer’s toolbox are commonly known, but there are a couple of useful ones that are newer and haven’t been picked up on as much.

Read on...

We are pleased to announce that we will be working with local firm Squires Group on their International Kitchen Schools website.

Squires are a forward-thinking company with a great understanding of how the Web can compliment and augment traditional marketing channels as well as streamline internal business processes. We look forward to working together on this and hopefully several other upcoming projects.

Back in October I posted an article on our first steps with HTML5. Unfortunately, since then we’ve tripped over a rather large stumbling block.

That article dealt with the reworking of our intranet. Luckily for me as a front-end developer no-one in the company uses Internet Explorer; this isn’t the case in the wider world. IE has problems with the new HTML5 elements: it can’t style them at all. There is a a solution though (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher): create each element once using Javascript and IE suddenly understands that they exist. On the whole this is a very good solution, undercut by one fatal flaw.

Print stylesheets

At Kyan we view a print stylesheet as a common courtesy to users. With it we can strip out headers and footers and just leave the page content. While printing though (for obvious reasons) Javascript isn’t executed. This breaks our html5shiv script and means that the new elements are unstylable in all current versions of IE.

The workaround is to wrap all the new elements in wrapper <div>s and style those instead, but then you’re increasing the amount of markup compared to current HTML4 or XHTML1, and for the time being this isn’t really a tradeoff worth making. Of course, with the gradual reduction of IE in the marketplace this tradeoff is something we should keep on evaluating.

Our new coloured stock business cards with white foil-blocking arrived today. Blue is the new black.

You would expect that being a digital company we would have little or no use for paper at all, especially when Instant messaging, e-mail or virtual paper (PDF) is in unlimited abundance. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Post-It® notes or ‘Stickies’ as they are more affectionately known, are powerful tool here at Kyan. This simple and versatile piece of sticky-backed paper is a useful tool for organising and visualising information quickly and effectively.

So, with Christmas creeping up, we had to think about our company Christmas card to send out to our clients and friends. Taking inspiration from this invaluable, 3 inch square and other works of Post-it® art (available to view on colourlovers.com) we created our very own pixelated, colourful Christmas tree on our new office walls. We all agree it looks very striking and it has also decorated our office in time for Christmas.

Watch our stop-frame footage and see it grow.

A study involving some 800 user testing sessions was recently published by CX Partners that dispels the usability myth that users do not scroll.

Read on...

Recently an admirer from afar, Morocco in fact, got in touch for an interview to publish on their website cssbit.com. We thought it was worth posting the interview here in full english.

Incidently if you have a question you’d like us to answer feel free to get in touch at info@kyanmedia.com.

Read on...

Quantum Cooling provide a range of equipment and services for the drinks dispense, refrigeration and air conditioning industries. They needed an appealing new site to explain their range of products/services to potential customers. Penguins would be a bonus!

We’ve built Quantum a bespoke content management system (CMS) to allow them to keep the site content fresh and relevant without them having to come back to us to make updates on their behalf. Whether it’s managing their product portfolio, writing news posts or adding happy stories about their clients, they can do it themsleves without the need for any web programming skills — it’s a cinch!

The new site is clearly laid out with a simple navigation system, a heavy dose of white space and allows Quantum’s unique service philosophy to shine through. Oh yes, and did I mention it’s got penguins?

http://www.quantumcooling.co.uk

Here at Kyan we like to keep up to date, so new technologies regularly come under the spotlight. This week’s focus: HTML5. Jumping straight into an unknown is rarely a good idea for a client project, but with no such qualms about internal projects I elected to rework our intranet.

Read on...

The majority of the web industry had, over time, come to the consensus that the keywords meta tag is not used by Google in ranking web search results. However, we’d never heard it from Google itself; that is until now.

Recently on the official Google blog they posted an article on just this issue and clearly stated that they do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

It’s worth pointing out that while this is only Google and other search engines may well use the meta keyword tags, it only serves to enforce our own approach to search engine optimisation that meaningful content is key.

A recent lunchtime project of ours at Kyan has been refurbishing and upgrading an old Arcade Machine.

After finding an old and broken RM Video cabinet on eBay, originally running Football Champ, we removed the old components and put in some new controls attached to a Mini-PAC USB controller. Once the various cosmetic upgrades were finished, we attached the Mini-PAC to the Linux machine running MAME.

More photos can be found in the Arcade Machine Flickr Set.

You can follow @kyanarcade on twitter to see new highscores.

I’ve posted recently about our office jukebox and the music we play on it. What I didn’t mention, however, is that the most hotly contested aspect surrounding it is not the music that gets played, but the way in which we can all vote on the tracks. Well if Pete’s going to be dropping Christmas covers in October then we all need to let him know it’s not right!

Recently I came across an article on the Youtube official blog that detailed some interesting insight into the way users vote for videos on their site. In a nutshell Youtube has a 1-5 rating system in which overwhelming majority of videos have a rating of 5 stars, some do get 1 star but there’s not much inbetween. Their conclusion…

“When it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference.”

We actually started off with a system much like the Youtube rating model, but we quickly found the same pattern emerged. So we dropped it for a simple thumbs up/down and we’ve never looked back.

It’s interesting debate though as rating systems are often contentious issues when building websites but when a site like Youtube, with that many users, publishes those kind of results you have to consider if it’s the definitive word on the matter.

With the new school year underway, we’ve just launched a brand new look and feel for Rokeby School.

We first developed the Rokeby School website back in 2006 and it’s served them well. In fact, under the hood it hasn’t changed a great deal, we’ve just given it a fresh new face. Our design team have gone for a more open and magazine-style layout utilising more screen real estate that modern screen resolutions allow us and we also created a matching email newsletter template that uses the brilliant Campaign Monitor emailing system.

Over the years we’ve worked with quite a few Schools, Educational trusts and local authorities. Read more about our websites for schools.

http://www.rokebyschool.co.uk

Location based searching is a hot topic at the moment with ‘location-aware’ browsing now implemented in Firefox and safari on the iPhone.

Whilst our old residence was beautifully hidden amongst the Surrey hills surrounding Cranleigh, it certainly wasn’t the most obvious place for potential clients to go looking for a cutting edge web agency. Even if it did proudly claim to be “England’s largest village”.

Now that Kyan has relocated to the busy town centre of Guildford we are up against a lot stiffer competition, with numerous other agencies now immediately surrounding us all competing to be top of the listing for terms like “Web design Guildford” and “Web development Guildford”.

Obviously we’re new in town so there’s a lot of work to be done, but a great place to start for any business that wants to show up in location based results is the free Google Local Business Centre (LBC).

Entry into Google’s LBC means that your business listing will show up in search results on google maps.

With the increasing popularity of location-aware mobile devices and desktop browsers utlising Google’s Location Services, optimising for local searches is more important than ever.

NEW ADDRESS: Kyanmedia, Guildford, 171 High Street, Guildford, Surrey, GU1 3AJ

Yes thats right, we have made the big move, a week earlier than the scheduled 24th July. The impromptu decision was made mid morning Friday (17th July, 2009) after discovering, Smithbrook was all out of power. It is assumed the heavy storms on the Thursday night were to blame for the overhead lines coming down in the Cranleigh area. As a result we were left with few other options but to relocate to our shiny new office in the heart of Guildford.

Read on...

There is a vision of the future where browsing the web will no longer require third party plugins for videos and audio playback, that it will be native to the browser. All made possible through the adoption of HTML 5.

Read on...

We’ve been using Ruby on Rails to build websites and web applications for a few years now. We might even consider ourselves one of the leading UK Ruby on Rails specialists.

We thought it was about time we wrote about reasons we use it and why it’s great for our clients.

Read all about our approach to Ruby on Rails development.

I stumbled across a really interesting idea at Dear Jane Sample, for anyone interested in marketing and the power of brand; documenting your daily interaction with brands via a timeline.

I was so intrigued I decided to give it a go. You can see the results below. I stuck with the brands that were bubbling at the fore-front of my consciousness so it’s not a completely inclusive list and my online life has been kept stripped down. However an interesting exercise!

Our article about optimising websites for search engines has now achieved number one status in Google for the term “Number one in Google” (View screenshot).

Read all about our SEO approach.

Good listings across multiple search engines can make or break a website, at Kyan we believe there are no real secrets to search engine optimisation (SEO).

Transparency with our clients is key, we don’t keep our techniques behind lock and key as we believe SEO is not just the responsibility of the web developers, but also of the content creators & writers.

Read on...

Not sure how long they’ll last in the job though!

Read on...

Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) is described by it’s developers as a “lightening fast ‘3D wall’ that lets you browse thousands of images, videos and more with ease.”

Cooliris is installed as a browser add-on for Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer and it works all over the web, including on google image searches, facebook, flickr, ffffound and numerous other websites.

Recently we implemented Cooliris into a stock image management system we’re building for a client.

They required an easy and quick way of viewing multiple images on the screen that supplemented the basic website view. Cooliris provided exactly that and wasn’t complicated to implement at all.

It essentially works by using an xml version of the page you are viewing. Cooliris can then automatically detect the feed via a simple rss link. That’s all there is to it!

Around a couple of years ago the “what screen resolution should we design for?” argument had mostly become irrelevant. 640×480 was out, 800×600 was mostly out and 1024×768 was a reasonable minimum. With this step change over and new grids in place life should be easy, right?

Think again. The intervening time has seen an explosion in web use on mobile devices and the future looks to only diverge from your standard 1024×768 grid you’ve settled on. So what different screens can you reasonably expect your users to view your site on?

Read on...

OK, so I listen to too much Radio 4, I can’t help it. But every so often they really come up with the goods, like this week’s In Business which has an interview with Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson.

Really worth a listen to anyone interested in the changing economic oportunities provided by the developing Web, copyright issues (good input from Creative Commons chair James Boyle) and the importance of Open Source and other ‘for free’ business models.

‘In Business’ home page and podcast

Recently themeforest.net ran a quick tutorial on how to achieve an image slide effect similar to our homepage. I thought I’d go into some more detail about the design decisions we made.

Read on...

Google alerts is a simple service that allows you to receive alerts on any Google search you want, whenever it is updated.

So when a new result is returned for your search, you’ll know about it without having to lift a finger.

Until just recently the alert was only available in the form of an email, fortunately however, Google have now syndicated the alerts into an rss feed.

The problem with the emails was that should you want to monitor a popular search term, with regular changes to the Google search listings, you’d be buried under an avalanche of emails.

The utilisation of RSS feeds is certainly a welcome change to Google alerts. Now we can all get back to monitoring Google for our favourite Search Engine Optimisation terms.

We all went on a company outing to see the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace. Most of us loved the film, but some of us particularly liked the typography. I personally loved the intro sequence which was put together by MK12. A legend of a motion graphics company.

The Quantum of Solace logo is made from a typeface called Neutraface by House industries. This typeface is just fantastic and there are so many font weight variations which all look dead sexy.

The beautiful location intro typefaces were handcrafted by Tomato. It was nice to see this attention to detail rather than the typical way of dealing with location typography.

The Entifyr is a small web application that started life as an personal experiment to automate the removal of problem characters from client supplied content (usually Microsoft Word documents). The offending characters are replaced with corresponding entities (hence the name) allowing the content to display correctly.

Read on...

Get pumpkin carving tonight! You’ll never have a better excuse to get creative. Take a photo of your creation and send your entries to us and we’ll post the post the most creative Jack-o’-lantern. See if you can better Professor Wake’s creation!

Here is a little inspiration:

25 inspirational pumpkin carvings

Recently I finished reading the book ‘The Tipping Point’, it was a fantastic read. I picked it after it was recommended by Jeremy Keith at this year’s d.Construct conference.

The book explores the reasons behind wide spread adoption of fashions and trends that happen once they’ve reached that mysterious ‘tipping point’.

Why do people adopt certain ideas and not others?

It is a must read for any budding entrepreneurs, launching a new product, service or even say, a new web application.

The author explains his ideas with a wide range of intriguing stories that make his concepts sound so logical and at the same time make it hugely entertaining.

Even though it was published back in 2002, the ideas are relevant today, particularly for anyone looking to harness the power of the community and social networking.

A few weeks ago I came across a blog post about Yammer, the winners of the top prize at Techcrunch 50, in the blog post I read the line:

“takes the familiar Twitter messaging system and applies it to internal corporate communications.”

Which is some thing we’ve been looking at for the last 18 months, so I decided to take a few minutes and have a play with it.

Read on...

‘Social media’ is the new buzz term. Everybody’s doing it, and why? Because it can generate masses amount of traffic to your website, which can easily turn into revenue. It’s really what ‘web 2.0’ is all about.

Read on...

A new site has appeared on the wonderful inter-tubes, brought to us by a web design firm in Minnesota – Rocket 55 – that looks remarkably similar to ours. As designers we all stand on the shoulders of giants, borrowing ideas and concepts, using the same typefaces, colour palettes and some may say that nothing is truly original but there is a line that can be crossed where an idea is no longer reworked but just plain stolen.

I’m pretty sure that this is one of those cases. Without knowing the full facts of the story, the company may not be entirely to blame. They may have sub-contracted the design work to a third party and be completetly unaware of the blatant rip off, but ultimately they are responsible and this doesn’t go un-recognised amongst the community.

What do you think? Genuine synchronicity or steal?

ps. Thanks to everyone who made us aware of this!

We decided to have a little fun now that summer is over, combining some design yumminess and behavioural goodness.

See if you are up to the challenge! Can you find the indomitable and mighty web geek PROFESSOR WAKE on our website. He’s hiding there somewhere…

A little clue: quae deorsum sunt quaerite

This year’s d.Construct ‘Designing The Social Web’ took place last week in Brighton and a few of the Kyan crew went along.

Overall the conference was inspiring and the talks were varied and interesting.

Read on...

The web is buzzing with the news that Google have officially announced their own web browser and it will be released (in beta) today.

‘Google Chrome’, as it will be known, has been built from scratch, is free and is open source.

Google’s has said it’s intentions for the browser are for it to ‘drive innovation on the web’.

• JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8 (faster javascript – open source)
• A process for each tab (So if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t crash & better management of memory)
• Task manager to view processes (Allows you to see which website is using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your cpu)
• ‘Speed dial’ home page comprising of your most visited pages
• Google Gears is built in
• Smart search directly in the address bar (aka Omnibox)
• Uses a ‘Chrome bot’ on the google crawling infrastructure to test it works against the most popular sites on the web
• The browser runs inside a ‘sandbox’ with restricted permissions to make it really secure (It cannot effect your machine or it’s processes)
• Private browsing mode
• Automatically checks against known phishing websites (These are available in an open api)

For the full low down I highly recommend you checkout Google’s comic they released.

Amazon is undoubtedly one of the web’s most successful online shops, a global brand, with operations all over the world. However, it’s not just selling products anymore.

Just one of the growing pains Amazon has faced over the years was the requirement for a scalable storage infrastructure.

Amazon invested in building their own solution and with their experience and expertise in this area they realised a business opportunity was there to be had and released their Simple Store Solution (S3) to the web industry.

S3 offers unlimited storage with high availability, low latency and low costs.

Recently at Kyan we’ve been increasingly taking advantage of S3 in our projects. Amazon’s storage is redundant and unlimited which makes it perfect for backups.

It also allows businesses that work with large amounts of collateral to concentrate on their core competencies and not waste resources implementing and managing a storage infrastructure.

Amazing really when you think Amazon started back in 1995 as a simple on-line book store.

As the U.S. TV broadcasters switch over to digital tranmissions a great debate is just starting out…

Who gets to use the fuzzy white noise that’s left behind?

Google are campaigning for the redundant spectrum to be put to good use.

Most notably for WiFi 2.0

A longer-range wireless technology that wouldn’t be owned by any one company. WiFi 2.0 offers the possibility of, to quote Google, “Affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, anywhere, at any time.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon decide on the future of the spectrum and whether it will be opened up. Google have started a petition and are encouraging everyone to spread the word via their YouTube channel.

So I’ve been using my ‘breakthrough mobile internet device’ for about a week now. Does it live up to expectations?

Read on...

We are proud to announce the launch of boxwish.com — ‘The world’s first movie inspiration site’.

Tim and the rest of Team Boxwish have been working really hard to find all of the cool things you saw at the movies, but the real driver behind Boxwish is the user generated content, it’s a community site after all.

So get involved — sign up, and get Spotting!

Sign up to boxwish »

CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) must have seemed like a good idea when it was first invented in 2000. Spam was beginning to become a major problem on the web and a method was needed to fight back. CAPTCHA at first glance seems ideal: a distorted image that would be instantly recognisable by humans yet incomprehensible to machines. Place some letters in the distorted image and get the user to type them back and bingo: you’ve stopped your spam problem.

Read on...

When the last iPhone was released it was a bit lacklustre as far as I was concerned. No 3G, no GPS, small memory, too expensive… Now Apple have fixed all of these shortcomings we figured it was time to jump onboard with the ‘breakthrough internet device’. In fact we decided to follow Carson’s lead and get them for everyone in the office.

It’s good to see you back! Wired network have resurrected every web designer’s fave resource and tutorial site Webmonkey.com

Read on...

Recently myself and Robin attended the Accessibility 2.0 conference. The agenda of the day was accessibility on the Internet in the ever changing world of rich media websites and social networking.

Read on...

One perennial web design issue that continues to vex and frustrate designers and clients alike is the limited number of typefaces available for text when set in HTML (i.e. without resorting to images or Flash).

But please don’t struggle against the tide. Go with the flow.

Read on...

Google Analytics rocks! I could spend hours/days/weeks sniffing about the statistical minutiae that Google Analytics serves up. Three users from X visited my site last week and each spent Y minutes on landingpage Z having been referred there by using the search term Z – amazing but probably not that useful.

If there is one metric you should look at, check out the bounce rate, the ‘I came, I puked, I left’ metric as so lucidly explained by Avinash Kaushik – check out the video presentation.

Why is it the owners of mailing lists just wont let you leave? Even when you have no interest whatsoever in what they are sending you.

Read on...

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one to suffer from a condition that appears to be affecting my general perception of reality; a condition akin to one of the super-mutants in ‘Heroes’ slowly becoming aware of their latent powers.

Increasingly spending up to 12 hours a day interacting with software over a 20 year period is finally coming to a head as my virtual capabilities begin to bleed through to that other ‘hinterland’ of reality – meatspace (or as any flesh-jock may short-sightedly call it, the real world’).

This brave new world beckons and I’m ready to jump in.

I guess it started out with the familiar pattern of applying the celebrated shortcut CNTRL-Z (undo). Whilst working in Photoshop, I would try something out, not like it, undo and try again, repeating this pattern until I was satisfied. This would often mean hundreds of ‘undoes’ an hour, thousands over a week and millions over a number of years. This alchemical ability to ‘juggle the forms of everyday life’ with no consequence has begun to bleed through to the ‘real world’. I drop a pen, a synaptic neuron fires a CNTRL-Z event and my pen is expected to instantaneously appear back in my hand. A rosy apple in the fruit bowl shines attractively and a CNTRL-X event is fired. My car keys have moved from where I carefully placed them this morning, a search event activates.

‘Static’ objects glint, offering hidden interfaces and occult geometries of interaction. My dirty dinner plate almost reveals the ‘re-format’ button and the page corners of my magazine quiver in anticipation of auto-curl. A true convergence is happening and I can’t wait.

The guys over at Campaign Monitor have just released a new feature that automatically converts your beautiful CSS into the inline style format required for cross email client consistency.

Read on...

When IE8 is released there is talk of it rendering, by default, as if it were IE7.

Read on...

A challenge was made, a date set and geeks rallied.

Lifting the trophy aloft, it was remarked at how similar it looked to a bowling pin; fortunately not one of the dazed’n’confused staff had reported any missing. Two close games, the second only won by 7 points left Kyan the winner on this occassion. Special mention should go to Steven ‘Rocketman’ Thompson whose genuine loathing for bowling pins meant that not only did he get the top score but also managed to upset the ‘magic’ bowling robot so much that a ‘tek’ was required to fix our lane.

Highlights:

Paul taking out his own ankle with a ball
Laurent coming second last
Phil wondering how may pins in ten-pin bowling
Stevie T’s top speed of 24mph

Thanks to all at Computer Strategies, especially Tony for organising and sourcing the prices.

Microsoft proves it has genuine intentions to make Internet Explorer 8 Web Standards compliant.

Read on...

Well it must be Christmas because the parcels are flowing thick and fast through Kyan Towers. Our nice postie left a particularly sweet little package on my desk the other day
in the shape of the tiny new sub-notebook from Asus, dubbed somewhat peculiarly the eeePC.

Read on...

The team at Campaign Monitor have now setup their dedicated Email Standards Project website

Read on...

It’s live! We have launched a brand new reverse raffle website with our friends over at Raffle.it (raffle.it)

Great to see one of the most prominent brands and technology leaders finally catching up with the ‘correct’ way to build web sites.

Read on...

A great article on Vitamin gives some sound advice for any budding web entrepreneurs out there.

Read on...

Campaign Monitor, our email newsletter manager of choice, will soon be launching a dedicated website to help fight the case for Web Standards support in HTML email.

Read on...

When we went to the Future of Web Apps conference a while back everyone was raving about API’s – “You must build an API” we were told. I had no idea how much of an impact they were going to make.

Read on...

BusinessWeek have just published an article on one of the most influential web professionals in the history of the Internet – Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards.

Read on...

The ‘Font Font’ foundry reference book is back …

Read on...

It’s easy to forget that Rails only first surfaced in the summer of 2005, just two years ago, and even people in the industry are still discovering it.

Read on...

Ok, so this post is really just an excuse for me to try out the last.fm playlist widget.

Pretty soon we hope to be working on some music sharing widget technology with our friends Carbon Logic, if you haven’t checked out their site yet it’s really worth a look, and it’s free!

Read on...

So we’re no longer hosting this blog on Media Temple. Unfortunately their support was nothing short of terrible.

Read on...

Since the launch of Kyanmedia, our choice of company name has, for one reason or another, aroused great interest. I am frequently asked where the name comes from, and why we chose it. Having recited the story many times over the past five years, I thought that I would post the definitive account here, in the Kyanmedia blog, for anyone who cares to know.

Read on...

We don’t seem to do much with IIS now which I am very thankful for but every now and again I have to dive back into that scary world. Today I had to force a site to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, a task that is nice and easy in Apache but seems to be something of a complex issue for IIS.

Read on...