Early on in my career, I remember the frustration of inheriting a website that was locked into a development company that provided terrible service. It was the first website I had managed, built using a bespoke Content Management System (CMS) developed and managed by this company. Requests for bug fixes or changes were often ignored or done badly, and I spent a lot of my time chasing up the developers to get anything done. I also found that the charges were far higher than they should be. However, we were stuck with this developer as they built and owned the software. I had to start planning

If a website has a lot of content and information, then it’s important to provide tools to help visitors navigate through the content to find what they are interested in. This is where website taxonomies come in

PHP is a website programming language. It’s the World Wide Web's most popular code, estimated to power over 80% of websites, including the likes of Facebook and Wikipedia. In December 2015, a major new version of PHP was released: PHP 7. PHP 7 is the first major upgrade to the language for more than decade. The main improvement is speed. PHP 7 is estimated to be around twice as quick as the previous version. It's also more memory efficient, using as little as half the amount of memory as before. There are also other benefits that programmers can use to enhance websites. However, there's one

I’ve managed and developed a number of union websites over the years. However, a project I’ve recently completed presented a completely different type of challenge - building a website for a union branch. Union branches often rely on a small number of volunteers, many of whom carry out union duties in addition to their day jobs. While large union websites can be preoccupied with using the latest social media tools and providing online services for their members, the needs of the union branch website are quite different. As Paul Moore of the CWU’s Greater London Combined Branch put it: “We may