Web Design and Drupal Development Blog

When building your website you need to take into consideration at some point in the future someone will mistype a url or find an old link that doesn't have a redirect assigned to it.

At this point the user will be directed to your 404 Page not found. This is a standard page that is set up by your internet service provider (ISP) or comes with your CMS eg Drupal.

This is where most sites let down their visitors as the standard 404 page is a bit of a let down. No real content for you find out where you should have been directed and sometimes not even any navigation!

Drupal is our Content Management System (CMS) of choice and with its' popularity growing ever stronger here's a list of tutorial sites we've put together for you.

The flexibility of Drupal is one of its' greatest assets and with modules galore to extend it there are many tutorials out there to help you along the way.

You'll find below a list of websites and blogs chock full of Drupal tutorials, videos and tips to help you get the most out of the CMS.

Twitter is a powerful micro blogging platform but how do you find people interested in your niche market?

How do you find out what a particular hash tag represents?

How else can you get the most out of Twitter and maximise the time you put into social media?

I've gathered just 5 of a plethora of tools out there to help you answer those questions.

There are many more out there but here are 5 great tools I use regularly.

5 Great Twitter Tools

Twitter Search

Twitter search lets you search twitter!

#Hashtags

Discover what's behind a particular hash tag, which are popular or the latest tags out there in the twitterverse.

Twellow

Twellow is a Twitter Directory, a great way to find other people to follow on Twitter from your industry or who share the same interests as you.

Twopular

We're happy to announce another new website design is now live, VP Communications, a PR agency specialising in technology and consumer technology.

VP's old site was looking a little tired and the navigation was poor to say the least. This new design breathes life into their website and brand, with clear navigation and an easy to follow layout.

We really enjoyed working closely with VP, their site is a classic example of our aesthetic principles of clean, easy to navigate, website design.

Follow Friday is a great way to share top people to follow on Twitter. The brainchild of @micah who also has a blog on Startups and Entrepreneurship.

Instead of searching for people interested in the same topics as yourself #followfriday gives you the chance to find recommendations from friends who they think deserve your attention.

You can waste time following some people who from first glance looked like good tweeple.

Recommendations take away the pain and gives everyone the chance to give their friends a chance to interact with more people.

Follow Friday is a great addition to give everyone a way to find valuable people to follow.

Give a short description of what someone tweets or if they're just a great member of the community simply big them up!

After having a great end to last year we felt now was the time to give the Makak Media website a complete makeover.

Results from our Blog Survey also backed up our thoughts and resulted in a brand new logo, strapline and web design.

We liked our old site design, which was extremely distinctive, but that was the main bug bear with some of you that answered our survey. The white on black was a little hard to read so this new look should please those people the most.

Speed & Layout

The speed of our old design was a major factor in its' design but the new one shouldn't cause problems in that department either. The layout for the new look was a major factor even though people liked our old design. A minimalist, clean layout was a must.

Having a two column theme makes for extra room to display more content above the fold to save on scrolling time, I know how impatient you can be!

sIFR Font Replacement

So you've been looking at ways to promote your business, gain new customers and someone suggested Twitter! What the tubular bells is Twitter I hear some of you say.

Twitter is a micro blogging service that is free to use either online or via downloadable applications to your desktop or mobile. You're allowed up to 140 characters to tweet away to your heart's content about anything you see fit. The smart people keep it on topic (your niche market) and insightful, minimum fluff!

Friends on Twitter are called followers, the more followers you have the more you can socialise and enjoy tweeting.

Now if you're not one for airing your views in the public domain you might be a little afraid of all the tweets flying around the wide world of the web! The great thing with Twitter is that the community is a welcoming and friendly place.