Blog | Deeson Online

Our new site was designed for mobile first

We have a new website!

When I was given the job of designing it, I spent a while staring at my blank canvas. Then I thought, "why don't I just do what I'd do with any other client?"

Probably the most crucial element to delivering effective websites is having a clear strategy and prioritising what’s important. After that, things became a bit more simple.

Here’s what we decided to prioritise:

I was in Amsterdam over the weekend for Frontend United – three days of focused workshops, talks and sessions on design, frontend engineering and Drupal.

There was a great deal of energy and focus for improving the frontend development experience in Drupal 8, and some brilliant sessions.

I presented on Object Oriented CSS, and you can find my session slides below!

@graemeblackwood

16 & 24 column grids are as dumb as a grid with 960 columns of 1px width.Designers, constraints are good for you! Eat your veggies.

— John Albin Wilkins (@JohnAlbin) February 23, 2012

While putting together the social icons for our new custom site font (to keep everything resolution independent – try looking at this site on a retina display!), the official Google plus icon just felt out of place. So I worked up a new version, still I think very much on brand, but referencing G+ circles, and a bit closer to our own site style.

I have put together an icon set so you can use it in your own project should you wish!

@graemeblackwood

Since the iPad 3/New iPad was announced, there has been a swirl of questions, which actually boil down to just one – 'how are we going to cater to this?'.

It's a real problem – do I want to, or should I, be serving up images at double the size for pixel-dense displays?

Today I am running a couple of Acquia webinars on producing beautiful Drupal ecommerce websites. I'll be looking at our journey with The Making Spot, from brief to completion, sharing how we came up against a number of Drupal design problems and general user experience design issues that needed working through.

Minimum Viable Communities

Here’s a couple of ideas we’ve been finding useful recently.

We’ve noticed a spike in people asking us about helping them build online communities.

And there’s a couple of things to say about this.

Somewhere in the North Indian Ocean we've spotted tropical Drupal heaven, shaped from pure white sand and caressed by the blue waves. At 30,000ft with phones in Airplane Mode it was pretty hard to get an exact fix unfortunately.

Anyone have more precise directions or know what it's like on the ground?

We’ve got into the nitty gritty of what a content producer does, but what does it look like once the content has been implemented?

Deeson took on the challenge of revamping the online presence of The Society of Radiographers, the trade union and professional body which represents the whole of the radiographic workforce. Its fresh new look at www.sor.org instantly grabs visitors’ attention and encourages them to return on a regular basis, thanks to the news stories being updated on a daily basis.

One of the most important and complex aspects of a DrupalCon is the schedule. An enormous amount of work goes into getting it right from the huge number of session submissions, which have to be reviewed and selected by the track chairs and their teams, to the people whose job it is to carefully consider and decide time slots for all of them.

It is well known that any website worth its weight in pixels has to be sharp, well written and chock full of appropriate content – as well as regularly updated to attract that all-important returning traffic. This is where the role of a content producer is vital for ensuring your website is relevant and engages with your target audience.

We went to Playful 2011 recently. It’s a conference where people talk about — you guessed it — the value of being playful in, mostly digital, experiences. This talk by Chris O'Shea is fairly representative of this year’s emergent theme.

At Deeson we’ve been thinking about play a bit too.

Tarsus has more than 100 international, multi-lingual sites in its portfolio in the exhibitions, publications and online media arena, including sites for the Dubai Airshow and major packaging, labelling and print exhibitions. We have also recently launched a new corporate site for the organisation.

Drupal’s core search technology is a good fit for small to medium sites, or where the search requirements aren’t particularly sophisticated. The benefits of core search are zero setup and no additional server requirements; the node content is indexed in the database.

However, for busy sites, sites with a lot of content, or if features such as faceting are required, then Drupal can be combined with Apache Solr, a specialised search platform.

How do you design for yourself?

Digital Canterbury = Digibury!

Improving your Drupal frontend with Object Oriented CSS

Why I often use a 24 column grid

Google plus circle icon

Thoughts on the pixel problem

Using Drupal to deliver beautiful e-commerce sites

Lean Communities

Minimum Viable Communities

Could this be the mythical Drupal Island?

What is a content producer? - Part 2

Designing a responsive conference schedule for DrupalCon Denver

What is a content producer? - Part 1

Playing with Drupal Burnout

High flying websites

When to use Apache Solr with Drupal

About Deeson Group

Minimum Viable Communities

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