Design Archives - Jonathon Mills Web Design

5 great photo resources for clients

When you get to the content stage of your new website, a lot of unexpected costs can pop-up. More often than not, clients won’t necessarily have their own image library to choose from when populating the site, and this can be quite a costly exercise if you don’t know about some of the more secret corners of the internet! The big hitters for stock photos (iStock, shutterstock etc.) could see you spending as much as £20 an image, and even the subscription packages work out at £5-8 per photo. There’s two sides to this; 1) It’s expensive, and 2) There’s a lot of pressure to pick the right image, knowing that if you get it wrong, you’re going to have to fork out a fair chunk for another photo.

Client Work: Alsta Watch Company

This is the first of a new addition to the blog. A client case study. I’ve deliberated long and hard over where to place these on the site, but it ultimately felt natural to include them as part of the blog.

Web design prices & services; Reasons to be wary of generic fixed prices

As with any business, part of not building success, but maintaining it is to identify what your competitors are doing and then consider ways in which you can improve on that. Every day I spend a bit of time looking at other agencies & freelancers to see how they market themselves and one thing I commonly see is the promotion of fixed web design prices. Headline banners proclaiming “web design from only £399!”, or “4 web pages from only £200”.

The best fonts for websites and how they can make you stand out

When designing a site, the one part I sometimes find the hardest, and ultimately most crucial, is the font choice. For me, this can completely change the way the site looks, even if the structure and content doesn’t change at all. In this blog, I want to explore the various different aspects of fonts and what a subtle font change can do for your presentation and accessibility. The topics I will discuss are:

Custom share buttons & short urls

Share buttons are something that are pretty common place on sites these days, varying in all shapes, sizes and colours. However, over the past 6 months or so i’ve encountered more and more problems with the plugins available for these share buttons. Their cross browser support is poor, semantically a lot are incorrect (they won’t validate with W3C) and sometimes they just simply won’t work. Instead of moaning about it, I decided to develop my own super-lightweight, javascript-free share buttons. These can be found at the bottom of any blog post, including this one.

An online blogof a web developer.