One of the latest projects I’ve been involved with has recently gone live: Prospect, the professional’s union, has just launched their new website. I’ve been helping with the website's new mobile and tablet friendly design, but also with some major changes to the information architecture. The new design is responsive, a design approach that allows the template to change depending on the screen size being used to view the website. This means that users viewing on tablets or browsers see a slightly different layout than those on desktops, avoiding the need to zoom in and out to read the content

Drupal 8 was released at the end of 2015. This is a major new version of Drupal, the second most popular website CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is the most popular CMS, and is a great solution for smaller websites and blogs. I use WordPress regularly to build these types of sites. However, for larger sites that need more complex solutions, I find that Drupal is usually the best option. While many CMS systems release major updates frequently, Drupal tends to be more stable. The last major release was Drupal 7 in January 2011. This new version (Drupal 8) was released almost 5 years

Recently, I’ve been looking at the sizes of union websites as a benchmarking exercise to inform a union website redesign project. I thought I’d share the results of the analysis, as it provides some interesting insights, in particular the huge variation in size. It’s difficult to say how much content a website should have. Having too much or too little content both have their pitfalls. A good range of high quality content is a positive, but too much content can bloat a website, making navigation and searching difficult and slow. Similarly, too little content will be of limited use to members

As well as designing and building websites, I'm often asked to review existing sites to help improve them. One common problem I come across is poor navigation. Navigation can make or break your website. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for, they become frustrated and leave. This is especially the case for websites with lots of information, and many of the websites I've worked on fit into this category. While website navigation is a wide subject, there are some key principles that should be adhered to when designing a navigation structure. The navigation should take into account the

Every website I've built over the last few years have been developed using a technique called ‘Responsive Design’. I'm often asked what this is and why it’s needed, so I’d thought I’d explain this approach to website design. Before the rise of devices like smartphones and tablets, almost every visit to a website was made on a desktop or laptop computer. This made designing websites quite straightforward. You knew what kind of screen width most of your visitors would be using, and you could design a website around these fixed dimensions. Now people access websites through a plethora of gadgets

Advances in technology have made it easier to collect and organise information than ever before. Companies like Google and Facebook store billions of details from websites and online accounts, and make good money from the services they provide to people. Governments have also been developing information-centric systems, from the laudable data.gov initiatives both in the UK and the US to the more questionable collection of personal data. Once information is collected and organised electronically, it’s much easier to share and exploit. One problem this poses was illustrated by the recent release

The NUT used to communicate with lay officers across England and Wales via post and phone. The Union saw how this could be improved by utilising technology to do things more quickly, cheaply and effectively. The result is ‘Hearth’, an online community and resource centre that has transformed communication between the union, its officers, staff and reps. Phil Katz, the Project Manager behind ‘Hearth’, explains why the NUT acted; “Local authorities were merging, so we had some large localities that could trace Union roots back 130 years, and other small, newer associations of just 600 members

In January, the government launched a new website aimed at making government information more accessible across the web. Inspired by a similar US website launched by the Obama administration, data.gov.uk provides free and easy access to large amounts of official data. The idea is that companies and organisations can use this information in new and innovative ways not provided for by the authorities. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, led on the project. In the 1990s, Berners-Lee devised a way to use the internet that would help make it easier to share information

When unions first started using the web, documents such as magazines, newsletters and circulars were loaded onto union websites, usually on an ad hoc basis. In addition, there was a centralised system for storing items like publications, circulars and minutes. Intranets were yet another repository. This expansion has caused problems. Some collections would be the only store for certain documents, while other items were duplicated across all the collections. For Union staff, this has caused confusion, and members have found that the information available from the website is usually limited to a