Website Design & Development Process

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Accessible Scroll-triggered Modal Overlay using jQuery

(or “How to put a visually disruptive overlay in front of your users without annoying them so much they instantly leave your site”) This is the techie companion post to our discussion on visually disruptive overlays AKA “those irritating pop-up things that seem to be everywhere nowadays”. It gives the technique we use on the […]

Choosing a WordPress Plugin

I regularly contribute to the WordPress Experts group on LinkedIn and a topic that has been cropping up a lot of late is “how do I choose the right WordPress plugin for my site”. So, based primarily on the contributions in this discussion, I thought it would be helpful to put some of Refined Practice’s […]

Charting & Visualisation in a Refined Way

Here at Refined Practice we’ve been busy working away on a little project involving the D3.js javascript library. D3.js provides a large set of tools to help visualise data online in the form of interactive visualisation, charts and diagrams. We love D3.js, it’s great – in fact founding partner Roland Dunn loves it so much […]

More SVN Code Snippets: Adding All New Files, Deleting All Removed Files

As we have mentioned before, we use Subversion to manage our codebase. That includes our WordPress set up with all its preferred and custom plugins. So, what’s the best way to update a plugin when it’s in your Subversion repository? The approach we take (which you might find handy) is to: Download the new version […]

Multiple Domains – Do You Need Them?

I’ve been having some discussion with fellow ceilidh band members about the usefulness or uselessness of buying multi domain names for the same site … i’d love to know the truth!

Is Google’s AdWords Guilty of Racial Profiling? No, not really…

A recent paper by Dr Latanya Sweeney of Harvard seems to suggest that Google’s AdSense ad delivery network is guilty of racial discrimination when displaying ads (although it’s actually talking about AdWords). This has led to a whole bunch of articles appearing over the web today covering the original paper with varying degrees of accuracy and accusatory […]