At the heart of every website we design in Kent is the experience the visitor of your website will have. This process is often described as User Experience (or UX for short).

If your looking for web design in Kent that actively takes into account the needs of your users then contact us today.

To find out more about UX read on.

Surfing without thinking

At Kent Web Host we know that users don't want to be thinking too hard about navigating your website, moreover the experience should be intuitive and natural. As such we ensure that sites are built with this mantra in mind, and succeed by using clear lines of progress throughout your site.

It's often at the initial design stage that we consider a users route through your website and this only happens once we know what a user wants to achieve in the first place.

Web designers in Kent are often faced with clients that want a particular look and feel to their sites, which of course is fine, but it's not until we delve a little deeper and uncover what your typical visitor wants can we truly design a website based around your needs and perhaps more importantly the needs of the people visiting your website.

Advocate for your visitor

At Kent Web Host we address the balance of what you want as a client and what your visitors want. You will undoubtedly have business objectives that need to be met with your new site and it's our responsibility as designers to strike an equilibrium between you and your visitors. So, in a way, we also work for your visitors and as such advocate for them.

It's all about balance!

Let's pretend we're Fisher Price

Okay, we haven't gone mad but we do sometimes need to imagine we're producing a kids toy, creating interactions that are automatically easy to use. Visitors are in a hurry, they don't want to wait around too long, so lets give them an easy to user UX that is so straightforward to use a child could do it!

Getting rid of extra clutter that doesn't add value to your business, or worse still detracts from your main mission, is often a good way to re-organise a heavy and tired website.

Don't worry, we're not too heavy handed when it comes to ditching useless content, we're more about making the old back into shiny and new and the confusing into a seamless, enjoyable and quality experience.

August has proved to be a busy month for us at Kent Web Host, with five websites to design our team have been beavering away (and enjoying the sun at lunchtimes!).

We have been awarded a contract to design a new website for an Electronics distributor based in Lydd, Kent. We won the contract out of a number of other web design companies in Kent because of the value for money our brief represented.

Also, we have been working with a Folkestone based photographer on two different projects. Again Kent Web Host was chosen to design the sites based upon the clean designs of our previous clients and the fact that our prices are not over inflated!

In other news we have been developing our sister website Luno Group which aims to offer internet marketing and web design throughout the UK. What makes Luno Group so different from other agencies is in its transparency of service and the quality of its SEO campaigns proved through measurable results.

As a growing company Kent Web Host which is a trading name of Luno Group continues to offer reliable, effective and results driven website designs for the local area, honouring our vision to "design affordable, search engine friendly websites that engage with your customers, promote your brand and take your business to new heights".

Find out more about us

About us Meet the team

Kent Web Host have just been awarded a contract to design a website for an established Solicitors in Medway. The project is in the early stages but it was decided from the start that we would build the website on the Joomla CMS platform.

Our client wanted to be able to update the new website without too much fuss and with a free day's training and full after-sales support the website is sure to be a success.

Keeping up-to-date backups of your website is possibly one of the most important roles we have as web designers. In this article we talk about how to ensure your Joomla website is always backed up and how to recover your website.

Whether your website you have designed is for a mission critical Kent business or a cake shop in Kent you will want to ensure that you are providing complete peace of mind to your client when it comes to recovering their website from a back-up.

At Kent Web Host we design a large amount of websites using Joomla as we feel this gives us maximum customisation yet provides an easy to use interface for clients wanting to update the content themselves. However, at Kent Web Host we don’t just hand over the website to our clients and take payment when the project is complete, we are still responsible for ensuing that everything runs smoothly after the website goes live.

An important element of this is taking regular back-ups of the website. Of course, server back-ups are scheduled at midnight everyday, however we have discovered an amazing automated Joomla specific back-up program called Akeeba.

What is Akeeba?

Akeeba Backup is a complete, easy to use website backup solution for your Joomla powered website. This program builds on its strong legacy that aims to deliver an easy to use, yet powerful, solution to backing-up, restoring and moving a website between servers of the same or different architecture and multiple URLs.

We found that Akeeba not only restored the Joomla Database and files, but also the entire contents of directory Joomla sits and even the favicon.ico file!

What is the process?

After installing Akeeba as a component the first job is to configure the software so that all your PHP and local server settings are identified. Kent Web Host use a geographically separate cloud-based cluster of servers and Akeeba had no trouble identifying our settings.

Start a new back-up and watch as the entire MySQL database, all server files and settings are packaged up within an installer.

Depending on the speed of your server this can take anywhere between 5 to 15miniutes. For us it took only three minutes to back-up the entire Kent Web Host website - now that’s fast!

Find your back-up

Its no good if you cant be 100% sure your back-up works. The best way we have found is to restore the back-up to an entirely new server.


Now find the back-up file, usually this is located in Administration/components/Akeeba/Backup. Next download this file and save it into a new folder with a suitable name (e.g. “KentWebHost-Backup)

Next download Kickstart (which is a tiny script that finds your back-up on your new sever), explore this folder navigate to the kickstart.php and your chosen installer language – now copy these two files into your new folder which has the back-up in.

Then upload this folder to its new destination, or where your old website resided.

Point your browser at the kickstart.php script and you should see this screen:

Now enter your database details and FTP login like you would do for a new Joomla installation. Follow the on-screen prompts and your finished.

Back-up complete

Congratulations, you should have back-up the entire website using this process.

Next job is to test everything is where it should be, then you can make a phone call to your client to let them know their website has been restored.

Click here to visit Akeeba website and download this program for free

Website Icons for Web Designers

What are Icons

Icons have in the past been limited to the computer desktop, providing a graphical representation of a file. For example the iTunes icon shown here gives you a visual clue as to the program. In a similar way icons used on websites also provide these visual clues as to the content.

Our website has a few icons used throughout the site, have a look at our homepage again and see where you can spot them!

The Visa icon shown here is a perfect example of why you dont need to necessarily create your own icons all the time.

One word of warning, use them sparingly as they are not there to fill up the page, they provide a purpose and a carefully chosen icon positioned in just the right place will fulfil that purpose.

What’s the purpose we hear you web designers ask, well making your site flow, ensuring that users don’t have to search around to figure out what information or product they are looking for, but most of all it to ensure that your users don’t have to 'think'!

Stuck to my computer right now is a small sign that says “Don't make me think!”. This reminds me everyday that someone visiting your website doesn’t want to search around and have to think about navigating your website, the experience needs to be seamless and flowing and before they know it they have brought one of your products, or filled out an online form or jotted down your phone number to use later.

At Kent Web Host we use icons, albeit occasionally (as overuse is bad!), to engage the visitor to your site and to ensure that thinking about working through your site is at the back of their mind, seamless surfing and buying your products being at the front.

Useful links

Free Icons
http://www.iconarchive.com/random.html
http://www.freeiconsweb.com/index.html
http://www.iconfinder.com/free_icons

Paid Icons
http://icondrawer.com/buy.php
http://www.iconfish.com/
http://www.professional-icons.com/buy.aspx

Today I wanted to talk about something many web designers mention through my contacts in the  industry – do we really have to still support the horrid IE6 (Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6)?

The problem with IE6

At Kent Web Host we do spend a ridiculous amount of time dealing with issues in IE6.

I'm sometimes completely perplexed at the issues it gives us web designers, and often I have sat in the office (stress ball in hand) staring at the screen in horror as the flipping button I want at the top of the screen sits happily (I'm sure its mocking me) at the bottom of the screen – now dont forget that in every other browser its fine, the button is exactly where I want it to be, but in IE6 no such luck!

Of course we still ensure that our clients websites work perfectly on IE6 as we believe this reaches a larger audience as, lets face it, there are some people that still use a 6 year old PC and we defiantly wouldn't want them to have a bad experience of our clients site.

How popular is Internet Explorer 6?

I gave this much thought because if IE6 was still popular then, well, I guess I better just get on with supporting it and stop moaning. So I needed to find out for sure, plenty of websites offer statistics but the most up-to date statistics comes from www.statcounter.com

You can see from the graph that IE 6 has just 2.06% share. That means 2 in every 100 people looking at a website will be using IE6 (sorry if I just explained what percentage means!!!)

If only 2% of users are looking at a site using IE6 then we can forget it then?

Wrong! Like I said before, we at Kent Web Host want ALL visitors to our clients websites to have a good experience, what if it was a Dover company that sold expensive fireplaces online and lets say someone on an old computer running IE6 wanted to place an order but couldn’t view the site properly, that’s a missed sale for the Dover company – and that would have been bad news for us as a web design company in Dover!

Scale up this issue and take into account that there are 55 million internet users in the UK, that’s over 1 million people in the UK still use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6!

So we conclude then?

Yes, I'm afraid we as web designers should still support IE6, to consider how our websites look on IE6 (dinosaur) machines and don’t forget that warm glowing feeling you get inside when you have made that pesky button appear at the top of the page in the wonderful and glorious IE6 (ok a little carried away here!).

So I may spend an extra hour or two in the office working on a website than I otherwise would if we didn’t have to support IE6, but boy its still worth it.

One last thing, the BBC reported recently (4 January 2012) on the demise of version 6 of internet explorer – see report

Oh and if you’re reading this on IE6, we know your still getting a good experience but, hey come on download a decent browser for free:

• Firefox http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ (recommended by Kent Web Host)
• Internet Explorer 9 http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/internet-explorer/downloads/ie
• Chrome https://www.google.com/chrome/?hl=en&brand=chmo

So its official then. The web goes on strike. But what does it really mean to us in the UK and web designers in Kent?

Whats it all about?

Remember a few years back when individuals where singled out for downloading films and music via P2P networks? Erm, yeah, of course none of us have ever downloaded anything which would infringe copyrights owned by multimillion dollar companies, we are after all respectful professionals. Well, as it turns out a small handful of court cases, the odd internet ban on some 16 year old who downloaded all of EMINEM's backcatalogue (it definitely wasn't me!) haven't really had the impact that these large corporations want.

Internet freedom, and the removal of it is, as some argue, the next victim in the guise of the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate which are backed by the movie and music industries as a means to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods by non-U.S. websites. Hollywood studios go even further by asking lawmakers to ensure that Internet companies such as Google share responsibility for curbing the distribution of pirated material.

But its all in America right?

On January 24th 2012 all the way over the pond in the US, Congress will vote to pass an internet censorship bill in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are reported to be opposed. The official (or semi-official website) sopastrike are asking fellow web designers and web masters to follow in the footsteps of Wikipedia, Reddit and other big web names to stand up for the web and display a blackout page on the 18th January. "We need to kill the bill - PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House - to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity" the site says.  But does this really effect us? And are we going to join in?

The debate continues

Of course we are not supporting those that intentionally and regularly steal intellectual property, infringe copyrights and damage the creative people behind some of our best loved music and film. Believe me, our office has probably the largest array of music tastes, check out my personal CD collection at home which has anything from Madonna to the Pixies, or Pink Floyd to the Beatles, all of which I must point out have at one time been actually purchased in CD format from a real shop in Canterbury.

However, this bill goes further than that. Some have argued that the bill is poorly written, goes way beyond allowing P2P sites to be shut down and sticks a great big arrow into the heart of what those scientists back in CERN all those years ago dreamed of - a free internet for everyone. Freedom of speech yes?

So what about Kent Web Host then?

I know its a cop out, but we have to put our clients first, so no we wont be taking part. All our servers will continue to hold up the 100% up time we have enjoyed for so long. But we will be taking part in our small little way.

What about you? Leave your comment here, we wont censor it! (unless its SPAM but thats another can of worms!)

Also, read what Google is up to on the 18th January - click here

One thing we know for sure at the Kent Web Host office is we're picky, there's no other way to describe us, we are, incredibly picky when it comes to the smallest elements of web design. Read on to find out how we combat our desire to find the right font...

Font for me, font for you?

Everyone loves fonts. Even if you don't admit it, we do. Typography is in our everyday lives, from the toothpaste tube to the font your reading right now - all carefully chosen to suit the message.

Appropriate (...ness)

It depends on the audience as to which font suits which website. When we are designing websites one thing we like to get our heads around first is the typography. It may seem a little over the top but we truly believe that all the individual elements of a web page send an important message to the viewer - and fonts are, in our opinion, very important.

So, once we have a chat with our client and get a firm understanding of their business its then straight to our huge selection (over 3000!) of fonts. We carefully trawl through and pick out our favourite three for each <H> tag.

Thank god for Google (...et al)

In the old days we used to embed the fonts, or download them to the views browser - which had its issues. Now, well things got a whole load easier once Google and others started to serve these fonts to the browsers. Everyday new fonts are added, and well, it satisfies us immensely to know that the bank is just getting bigger.

Old favourite

I cant talk about fonts without giving away our favourite. A unanimous vote puts Helvetica at the top spot (as if there was a better font!).

Want to see an example of Helvetica? Well you just read a whole article in it!

Here are some fonts we like at the moment:

Adelle Basic


Tinos


Titilium


Lekton


Franchise Bold


Open Sans


Merriweather


Ostrich Sans


CartoGothic Std


Rokkit