Caboodle Digital Blog

Caboodle have decided to get a brand new website! Woo hoo! There’ll be more pictures, less text to read and more interactive stuff. So watch this space a brand new, up to date, shiny, sparkling website expected soon!

You may have noticed slight changes in the news and blog section on our website, the ability to leave comments, option to view posts by category, the tag cloud…yes, we have a new product to offer!

A fully functioning blog has been integrated into the Caboodle website to help us better manage our news. It automtically archives and sorts all posts, produces search engine friendly links to all posts, creates search engine friendly file names and page titles, and allows us to easily tag and categorise articles.

We can integrate this functionality into your website for just £20 per month. You don’t pay per page, and can update the content yourself as often as you like, with absolutely no limits to the number of articles, categories or tags! If you’d like further information please get in touch on 0845 4025 340 or email contact@caboodledigital.co.uk.

For those of you who want to get straight into writing your content without all the reading, we have produced a quickstart guide with just the highlights to help you along the way.

We would love to hear from anyone that has read this series to find out if it has been useful or if it can be improved, or if you have any suggestions for future series’.

Last night Caboodle sponsored the Gorseinon College A Level Computing Student of the Year 2008 Award.

I would like to say congratulations to Gemma Prangle, and wish her all the very best for the future.

I have been working with Gorseinon College since I completed my Knowledge Transfer Partnership with them in 2006. This has so far involved speaking to computing students about the industry and, obviously, presenting the award last night. We are pleased to be associated with Gorseinon College as they work closely with the industry to help their students make the best of their courses, and we hope to be able to help the college by offering live industry-based projects to students in the near future!

Part 3 of our series, How to Write Content for your Website, is now online.

Looking at defining who your target audiences are and the type of content to include, this should give you plenty of ideas about what you can include on your website.

Part 2 of our series How to Write Content for your Website is now online here.

Find out how to write text that is easy to scan and focused to help your visitors find what they are looking for.

Part one of the new (and first) series - How to Write Content for your Website is now online!

Part 2 due next week!

Writing content for a website is one of the most important and frightening tasks of the whole process. So to help, I have started to write a series of articles to help you along the way. First part will be available in March, so come back soon!

If you’d like to be informed when the article is online please send an email to rhian.davies@caboodledigital.co.uk.

According to W3Schools, the number of users with a screen resolution of 800 x 600 has decreased from nearly 50% to 14% in 5 years (from 2002 to 2007). So with 80% of all web browsers using a minimum screen resolution of 1024 by 768, do we still need to worry about designing for smaller screens?

If you ask our designers, the answer is a definite no. Absolutely not. Closely followed by “Tell them to get a proper monitor!” A screen resolution of 800 x 600 is pretty restrictive, especially with an emphasis on good-looking, well designed websites, plus it can look fairly pathetic on larger screens. Either a tiny box in the middle or stretched across the top of the monitor with really hard to read sentences.

Even our developers agree that building for larger screen resolutions is easier as more information can be made available. However, applications and forms that have been designed for a larger resolution can be difficult to use on 800 x 600 displays.

It is definitely a judgement call. Smaller displays are being replaced (according to http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php 800 x 600 screen resolution is down to 7.31% as of 31/01/2008) but you do need to take into account your target audience. If your target audience is a group of technophobes, the chances are they will still be using 800 x 600. There’s no real right or wrong answer…and in a few years time we’ll have exactly the same debate but with larger numbers!

It was a crazy end to last year with everyone wanting their website live for the new year. Well, we have decided that we will use the New Year as an opportunity to bring our website up to date, too!

So over the next few months you will see some changes to the Caboodle website, including new features, downloads and images. I also have a New Year’s Resolution to make sure the website is kept up to date.