Notes on web design, ecommerce and public sector work. Written by the people who build the sites, not a content team.
We build websites for a living, so rebuilding our own is a strange kind of pressure. It also gave us a rare chance to do the thing we tell clients to do: strip everything back and ask what the site is…
Some websites answer to one client. This one answers to six. The National Partnership for Ocean Prediction brings together six of the UK’s leading marine science institutions under a single banner — a…
Learned societies, research consortia and academic journals are some of the most interesting clients a web agency can have — and some of the most poorly served. Their requirements sit outside what a g…
When a website is slow, people tend to treat it as a technical annoyance — something for “the web person” to look at eventually. It isn’t. A slow site is a business problem with a measurable cost, and…
WordPress has a plugin for almost everything, and most of the time that’s exactly what you want — a solved problem, installed in minutes. But “almost everything” isn’t everything. When your requiremen…
“Accessible” is one of the most over-used words in web design and one of the least often earned. People say a site is accessible when they mean it has alt text on a few images. Real accessibility — th…
“Should I build on Magento or WooCommerce?” We get asked this a lot, and the honest answer is the one nobody wants: it depends. But it depends on specific, knowable things — so here’s how we actually …
Security update
You may have seen news this week about "PHP2Shell", a pair of critical security flaws in PHP. PHP is the language that runs WordPress, Magento and a large share of websites worldwide. A few of you have been in touch about it, so I wanted to update everyone.
The short version: your website is protected and you don't need to do anything.
The flaws are in PHP itself, not in any particular website or host, so they affect sites everywhere. The PHP team gave advance warning on Tuesday, which meant we had our plan ready before the fix arrived. When the patched versions were released on Wednesday afternoon, we started applying them across the servers we manage straight away. That work is now complete.
Martin Shelton, Velocity Web
