Lessons I learned from the design of the NES

This week I was in the rare position to be able to learn about the design of the Nintendo Famicom (that’s the NES to us Westerners) from its designer Masayuki Uemura. He spoke for a couple of hours at The National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham. We heard about design decisions, successes and failures of the project from it’s inception in Japan to becoming a global phenomenon.

Creating a robust event search facility for Derby Museums

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here because I’ve been busy working on the prototype for the new Derby Museums website. The prototype has come together very well but there are always going to be a few head-scratching moments. For me, one of these centred around how to search and filter events. The […]

How to run more efficient meetings

I used to think that I didn’t enjoy client meetings. I always felt that they were a waste of time and that I could achieve far more by simply communicating with clients over email. I included phone calls in my definition of meetings too by the way. I felt like email was a much more […]

Move WordPress from localhost to server without using plugins

If you develop your WordPress websites on a local machine you might be viewing at a URL like localhost:8888/yourdevsite/ which is fine until you get to the point you need to launch the website or move it online for a client to take a look. I’m going to show you how to move WordPress from localhost to […]

Moz 804 SSL Crawl Error

I’ve been tracking our company website in a Moz Pro campaign for a few months and found it quite useful. Everything was going great until I moved the site to Amazon’s CloudFront CDN. Every week Moz emails me with a list of any potential SEO issues to fix on the site and the first of these reports […]

Hide your WordPress username for extra security

I love WordPress but there are a few defaults which aren’t great from a security point of view. One obvious example is the way that WordPress makes your username visible to the whole world in the slug of your author archive which generally appears at www.yoursite.com/author/username. There is often a link to this URL included on […]

Free computer with magazine

When I started using computers many years ago they were expensive. Thankfully they’re getting cheaper and cheaper to the point that something amazing just happened!

View from the top: A charity abseil down Jurys Inn

We’ve been working with Derby Hospitals Charity for a while now and we have regular meetings at their office at the Royal Derby. Today was a little different as we took a trip to the Jurys Inn to see Vicky from the Charity team abseil down the side of the building, along with about 40 other people all of whom are braver than me.

Derby Uni Degree Show 2015

Last weekend we decided to take a trip over to Derby University to have a look at the graphic design, illustration and animation degree show. There was an interesting range of styles on show so we decided to collect together a few of our favourite pieces which you can see here.

Derby Silk Mill, Museum of Making

Yesterday evening we were given a tour of Derby Silk Mill by Daniel Martin, Curator of Making. We’ve been to the Silk Mill many times before but being shown the building and its contents by someone like Daniel really opened my eyes to what we have here.