What is an HTTPS certificate? The “S” in HTTPS stands for secure and means that data being sent between a browser and a web server are encrypted, whereas connections to a standard HTTP website are not. Not the ideal situation if you are a law...
Technology
I’m sure we’ve all been to those sites that take so long to load or confuse you at the first hurdle with poor signposting, or simply don’t look great. Usually, it means, you click off the page and end up on a competitor’s website,...
As we mentioned in a previous blog post about building a sustainable website , if the internet was a country, it would be the seventh largest polluter . In an increasingly digital world, now is the perfect time to take stock of our digital habits. ...
To most of us, spam emails are a time-consuming annoyance, but in some cases, they can become a serious cyber security threat. Whether it’s a phishing scam which tricks you into revealing sensitive information, or a link to download malware, none of us...
What do you picture when you are asked what the internet is? Perhaps it is an abstract ‘cloud’ of information, or maybe a dark warehouse with rows of computer servers innocently blinking away. But our internet usage is not as abstract and...
Coming up with the winning formula for a great performing website doesn't happen overnight - it's a process of analysing website data and fine-tuning things along the way. Read on to find out what we suggest... The best indication of user...
reCAPTCHA v3 is the latest version of Google's spam protection service. This version runs in the background of over a million websites, helping to protect them from abusive behaviour by determining whether site interactions are being made by humans or...
Head of Design Tracey Stock outlines the key things to consider when choosing images for your website
The fastest and easiest way is usually to perform a simple 'hard-refresh'. Most Browsers: Hold down the Shift key (⇧) and click on the refresh page button (⟳) in the browser using your mouse. Internet Explorer users: Hold...
We've all grown weary at some point of the never-ending tide of spam directed at our in-boxes. There are many types of spam, ranging from unsolicited advertising which simply wastes time, to the most hostile type, phishing , which is used to...
The 'Pixel Pioneers ' is a series of talks and events all over the UK. They're affordable and just a great way of getting like-minded people from the tech industry together. I've been attending the one held in Bristol since they started a...
Your website's speed is one of the easiest and most important benchmarks used to gauge how well it's performing as a whole for your business - but it can often be overlooked and only considered, later down the line once a website's been launched....
1. No project brief You wouldn’t go on a holiday without doing some form of research or planning first, so why would you design a website without knowing what you want? Writing a brief doesn’t need to be complex, it just needs to have the...
This is a practical guide to GDPR that summarised the legislation but goes on to explain its impact on websites - listing all the things that a website owner or website agency/developer will probably need to address in order to be compliant. You will need...
Following Google’s announcement that Chrome users will be alerted if they access a non-HTTPS site , several clients have asked why we use only use certain Certificate Authorities for the purchase of certificates instead of a free option. Although it...
If you have a website with us running HTTPS there's a good chance that the secure certificate was issued by Thawte who are part of Symantec - an organisation who issue about a third of all the certificates in use today . You may also have read about...
It’s Ada LoveLace Day and couldn’t think of a better time to introduce myself! I’m Conscious’ Ada Bot! I’m still very young (aka this is phase one of the Conscious chatbot product), but I can help you search the site for...
Most large websites have three types of navigation: Header-navigation which is the same on all pages of the site - these are usually simple drop-down menus with options presented in a single vertical list but sometime they can be mega menus (with more...
Do you still have a non-secure http website? If so, read on, this is IMPORTANT! In a blog post last year, we outlined why it’s important to make the switch to https, but there are still many sites that have not made the switch. And we have more...
You are probably aware by now that the Data Protection Act of 1998 is being replaced with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25 May 2018. It’s important that firstly, you understand what it is, and secondly, you implement what is...
What is the screen resolution of the average user in the UK legal sector? This used to be a straightforward question with a sensible answer but nowadays the situation is quite complex - there are a lot of different devices used to access websites and a wide...
There was a time when the majority of people used Internet Explorer and the questions web designers' asked had to do with their nervousness about people with old browsers, for example: "what proportion of people user Internet Explorer version...
Overview In essence Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an attempt by Google, Twitter and a few others to encourage large news publishers to provide a faster experience for their pages on mobile devices. For background reading please see ...
Encryption only one aspect of security There’s much more to security than encryption - we’re going to be talking in this post most about encryption but don’t forget that there are lots of other technical issues that have a massive bearing...
In the age of data the more information you can see about visitors to your website, the more you can do to enhance it. With this is mind we have been looking at useful bits of information that we can track and view. The most recent bit of data we have began...
Back in 2008, analysts predicted that by 2015, mobile Internet usage would surpass desktop. Well, as it turns out, they were spot on. In 2015 we saw mobile searches finally overtake desktop searches – not because desktop searches were decreasing, but...
From the moment somebody – anybody - clicks on a website, a timer starts in their head. That timer is set to roughly one minute. As soon as this timer begins, the visitor says to the website: “impress me.” The website then has one minute to...
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a DNS technology designed to improve the authenticity of email by basically telling the world "if you get an email from us that doesn't come from server xxxxxx then it's not us". At first glance...
Building a website to be “responsive” involves defining a series of breakpoints and writing CSS code so that the site looks different on different devices. For example, a three-column site when viewed on a desktop will often use the first column...
If you haven’t heard about the new .law Top Level Domain by now, you must be making a conscious effort to ignore it. Back in April , we did a little investigating into what it was all about, and in October we gave you the lowdown on how and when to...
You might not always have time to do things the long way, and you might not always want to spend a fortune. For those times, I've put together a list of free tools that can help with all the extras. If you have any more to add to the list, get in...
Update 27-Oct-2015 - You can now register your .law domain name through us at http://csl.join.law/ We wrote about the impending introduction of the new .law top level domain , back in April. Well, just today we’ve found out more about the process...
When it comes to purchasing products, consumers have been been buying online for quite some time now. It’s a secure and convenient method of making payment, and now law firms are increasingly using this system to facilitate transactions from their...
ICAAN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) who are the organisation responsible for the introduction of new top level domains has given exclusive rights to a company called Minds + Machines to operate a new .law gTLD (Generic Top...
Have you seen a sudden drop count of "likes" on your Facebook page? Well this is because Facebook are having a sort out. Facebook has recently announced it will be changing the way it counts "likes" for pages. Any accounts that have been...
Last month we updated you on how Mobile Friendly was becoming a ranking factor for Google on 21 April , since then Google have been put in the hot seat to elaborate a little more on the subject. At SMX West, Google's Gary Illyes highlighted the 12...
Our site is mobile friendly! Is yours? As suspected, Google has announced that as of 21 April 2105, mobile friendly will become a ranking factor in mobile search results. This will make it easier for users to get high quality search results that are...
Heaven forbid this should happen to you, but more often than not sites get hacked and in order to recover from it, a huge amount of work is involved. There's great article on the Google Webmaster blog that has two case studies on the process...
Here's a timely reminder that the Internet is in fact a creation of scientists and engineers and that these #saintsofourmodernage are passionately committed to ensuring that their creation out-lives us all. Sometimes that means that things needs to be...
Having recently undertaken some large-scale internal development work on the Conscious Platform we've been taking a look at how our testing and QA processes need to adapt to ensure that we're still putting our best foot/feet forward. A huge part of...
Citrix is popular with law firms in the UK - particularly its products that provide virtualisation services. Citrix users don't normally experience any difficulty using their preferred browser to access websites. However, from time to time our clients...
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the address system that we use today - you may be familiar with addresses that look like this: The numbering system is hierarchical and provides a way to uniquely identify every computed on the network - about 4...
The concept of personalisation is almost as old as the internet itself - the basic idea being that a user tells the site about their interests which then allows the website to customise particular pages (usually the homepage) to provide direct access to the...
What is HTTPS? HTTPS (or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure method of transferring data over the internet that is used to stop unwanted snooping of your communications. At this point in time, it's use is mostly limited to certain areas...
Building an effective website is a very satisfying endeavour – a thrilling marriage of creative design and technical skills. Design trends come and go in quick succession but the way that sites are built has remained relatively unaltered..... until...
A lot of misleading information is written on the subject of sitemaps suggesting that the presence or absence of a sitemap is going to have an impact on rankings. For the vast majority of websites you can relax, this is simply not the case - Google will find...
Anyone involved in web development knows that it's important to test sites on many different browsers, but which browsers need to be supported and when is it OK to drop support for an old browser? To answer these questions we keep an eye on usage...