Design & Development Blog Posts

Design & Development

Preface: Let’s make a ruckus Chapter 1: A Guide To This Guide Chapter 2: Why Page Speed Matters To Digital Marketing ← You are here Chapter 3: What Impacts Page Speed? Chapter 4: Novice – Image Compression And Such Chapter 5: Intermediate – Server Compression And Geekery Chapter 6: Advanced – Varnish, Apache and nginx… Read More

Design & Development

This is a question I get asked a lot as senior developer at Portent. A client, new or existing, has an established site running on some platform, and wants to add on a blog, a microsite, or the ability to easily control top-of-funnel marketing content. Technically, “in parallel” means WordPress (WP) is set up to… Read More

Design & Development

In an effort to streamline development updates to a code base in a staging or production environment, we have created an auto-deploy setup guide for any GitHub (github.com) repository. What you will need: A server to host your site. Our example is a Ubuntu (Linux) server running either Apache or Nginx and PHP SSH access… Read More

Design & Development

Back some 15 years ago when I first entered into the creative agency world as a Project Manager, I was taught how to manage and lead projects in a traditional and linear way. Each team member, each discipline, and every contributor had their place along the project path.  Once the strategist was done setting the big… Read More

Design & Development

If you’ve worked in the world of the internet at any point in the past few years, there is a good chance you’ve heard of the hot new technology that is HTML5, and there is a similarly good chance that what you’ve heard is largely hype and buzzwords. While HTML5 does offer a great deal… Read More

Design & Development

Photo by Jeremy Keith. With the multitude of phones, tablets, phablets, fondleslabs, and other devices on the market, it can be difficult to determine whether or not your new responsive web site is actually responsive. Unless you have a lot of cash to blow on every mobile device that exists, you are probably going to… Read More

Design & Development

In college, when we asked our teachers how to assign a price to our art, they would tell us to charge whatever it was worth to us. This answer was thoroughly infuriating because we wanted a ‘correct’ number. What’s the equation? Is each square inch of canvas (or wood, or paper) worth a certain amount?… Read More

Design & Development

The days of designing websites based merely on visual components are over, unless like being invisible. Don’t get me wrong. I am not against well-designed websites. Visual design of your website plays a key role in shaping your potential customers’ opinions of your brand. The first six seconds after someone lands on your website can… Read More

Design & Development

When developing responsive websites, you will inevitably encounter designs that require some kind of HTML reordering. Often this arbitrary reordering can be achieved through clever CSS tricks, but if that is not possible or practical, you may end up having to do some kind of javascript to sniff for browser widths. Enter Intention.js. Intention.js is… Read More

Design & Development

Information Space has a conceptual mirror... Physical Space Having recently worked my butt off to earn a Master of Architecture, I often come across those who are curious about my decision to channel my design education into the wonderful world of the interwebs. Basically, I'm regularly asked what capital-A Architecture actually is– as in, physical… Read More

Design & Development

The Setup Front End Development is a fairly new concept. Back when “Webmaster” was an actual job title there was no real “development” on the front end. Websites were structured using tables, CHSS and SSP were being joined together to make what eventually would be CSS. The web was still primarily a place for documents,… Read More

Design & Development

If you’re like me in the kitchen, sometimes you want to add a little North African flavor to dinner. After some light Googling the other night, I found plenty of couscous recipes, but I also found this culinary gem: “5 Couscous Cooking Mistakes to Avoid.” Wait, what? “Cooking” couscous amounts to no more than adding… Read More

Design & Development

Change is in the air around Portent. Change that’s directly tied to how we see the future of Internet marketing. And it’s exciting. And it involves cool design innovations like parallax scrolling and HTML5 animations. As we shift our focus more and more towards what we call 10% content—deeper, larger projects that take bigger risks… Read More

Design & Development

Update! Learn the ins and outs of a faster site in our Ultimate Guide to Site Speed! As you may already know, we’re a little obsessed with page load speed. We wanted our home page to load in under 1 second, and we were close. But close isn’t good enough. So, with some guidance from… Read More

Design & Development

***** If you’ve ever used Photoshop on a Mac, you’re probably familiar with this guy. Would you like to send him packing and never see him again? If you answered yes, strap on your Photoshop helmet and get ready for the blog post of your life. For this blog post I am using Adobe Photoshop… Read More