Author archive

PowerPoint. Yum. Don’t tell everyone, but I quite like PowerPoint. There, I said it. There are two main types of PowerPoint files: there are true ‘presentations’ and there are ‘reports’. Reports are often quite long with a lot of text, graphs and charts, which we can summarise to our clients on a call (but then […]

There’s nothing worse than a product with an overcomplicated design that forces you to take a series of complex steps to complete a task. I mean, there obviously are worse things, but for the sake of this article – there’s nothing worse! User experience (UX) is all too often overlooked when it comes to things […]

The first part of this series, written quite a while ago now, covered a couple of utilities that I still use today – an image resizer and program for taking screenshots. I’ll cover re-sizing again here, plus a few other tips, tricks, and tools that I have since added to my go-to list of best […]

Every now and then when using some of our favourite, well-established pieces of software, apps and websites, I notice fiddly interfaces, misleading labels or obvious missing features. It seems churlish to criticise Microsoft, eBay or Google and the like – companies who have created great pieces of software and changed the way most of us […]

We all love a keyboard shortcut. They speed up your workflow, make repetitive tasks more bearable and they’re a great way to impress your friends! At Coast, Adobe XD and Sketch are now our web design tools of choice, but Photoshop still gets plenty of use. Photoshop has an array of useful default shortcuts, but […]

We all know the few basic rules we need to follow to ensure a nice, speedy and accessible website: efficient design, architecture and coding, good content, well compressed images and good hosting. Today I’m going to concentrate on image compression, hopefully giving some simple but helpful advice. Efficient image size was something that was very […]

A snap election calls for another snap poll of the UK’s main political party websites, a review we last carried out in March 2010. This time we’ll include social media, which is where the lion’s share of the action is bound to take place. I want to see which party’s web presence gets my vote. […]

As a company, Coast Digital will no longer be supporting IE6 by default. We are of course being pragmatic about how we enforce this new rule: if we update an existing website with a new section or widget, we will still ensure it renders correctly in IE6. But clients who insist on IE6 support for […]

On Sunday I went with a couple of friends on our annual day out to the Frieze Art Fair in London’s Regent’s Park. And just like the previous two years we attended, the experience was extremely rewarding and inspiring. The fair is housed in a huge temporary structure right in the middle of the park. […]

Once again, it’s time to vote for a new leader (or an old one, depending on your political persuasion). Over the next few weeks we’re going to hear lots of blather and bluster from the party leaders and their ministers, all claiming that their vision of the future is the right one for Britain. But […]