In this article we will look at the basics of Django and demonstrate its simplicity by walking you through the process of setting up a straightforward blogging app.

What is a web framework?

A web framework (or web application framework) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web sites and online software applications — including web services, web resources and web APIs. Web frameworks aim to alleviate the overhead associated with common activities performed in web development by providing a series of tools designed to simplify and accelerate the technical development process for web developers.

So, what is Django, and what is it good for?

Simply put, Django is a Python web framework designed to enable website and web application developers to build and deliver complex projects quickly, securely, and to a consistent, ‘clean’ style. It’s got a series of out-of-the-box tools that support, enhance and speed up the traditional web development process, and help get otherwise complicated work done rapidly to a very high standard.

Django provides a series of software tools that take care of a lot of the non-project specific ‘grunt work’ for a developer straight out of the box. That means that developers can spend more of their time writing the important stuff — like actual features — while lots of the mundane, ‘standard’ stuff that needs to happen in the background to serve a web application is handled automatically.

Have I heard of anything that’s built on Django?

Yes, you probably have. Pinterest is a very high traffic, distributed Django system. Instagram’s web application is written on Django. The Washington Post, Rdio, The Onion and NASA also use Django. You’re probably sensing a theme here. These guys are in charge of complicated, very high-traffic, large scale systems — and they’re all doing it pretty well (or appear to be, anyway!). Bitbucket and EventBrite also run on Django (and in fact, the current EventBrite team are made up of a number of Django’s core development team).

So, what does it look like on the technical side?

There’s an awful lot to Django — lots of pretty brilliant engineering under the hood, and subsequently lots of great features to use. Covering everything Django can do would be impossible for a single blog (and that’s what the documentation is for) — but if you’re interested in a more general technical evaluation of how it works, you’ve generally got the following five main components.

Apps

Building features in Django typically means you’ve got to put together an ‘app’, which is designed to do a single thing, and do it very well. An app in Django is a self-containing code structure that is made up of a number of different files that usually contains everything it needs to get something done — as well as any references to other apps, if you need to share data between them.

An ‘app’ is made of a series of base files. You can also create new ones and import them where you think they’re necessary — but for building simple applications, the base project structure is ample.

Models

Models in Django are a mechanism to allow developers to interact with a database (doing things like creating, reading, updating and deleting) without directly touching the database layer of the stack with any of their own code. Models are what are referred to in the software world as an ‘abstraction layer’ between the database and application layer — and in Django’s specific implementation, it means you almost never have to write any raw SQL — because your model is a fully accessible Python representation of your database table. That means that instead of writing a raw query, you can simply import and call elements from your model in Python, without having to go any lower down than the application layer.

It’s a brilliant way to keep code clean, well structured and reusable — and of limiting any interactions that could potentially be dangerous or inconsistent. It also means that a lot of the SQL specific stuff (like validation) can be kept and handled at the model level, which makes it very easy to scan a model file and understand how it corresponds to the tables in your database, thanks to Django’s heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Views

After creating a model, creating your database and then storing some data, you’re probably going to want to do something with it. Serving data out to a HTML template for the user to see requires what is called a ‘View’ — which is a file designed to process and deliver data to other parts of the web application. Views are powerful because they’re just Python files — anything you can do in Python you can do within a view — which means you can access, cut up and stitch together data in pretty much any way you like. Django has a whole load of tools to help developers do it rapidly, too.

Importantly, Django’s Generic Class Based Views are a powerful time saver designed to stop you rewriting the same views over and over again for different projects.

URLs

Good URL schemas underpin any good web information architecture, and Django is designed to help build simple, dynamic URL systems with ease.

Each app usually has an associated urls.py file — designed to allow you to define a collection of routes which Django will test the website visitor’s current URL against. If there’s a match, then Django will call that URL’s associated view and execute any logic associated with it, returning the result to the appropriate template, and the user to the appropriate URL. This in-built URL handling system is an exceptionally powerful way to architect large, dynamic URL schemas, with very little overhead.

Templates

Templates are the parts of a website or web application that are served as either individual HTML pages, or components of other HTML pages to website visitors. They’re written in HTML, and their styling is dictated by CSS — but Django’s own templating language means that you can call database objects out with ease. They can either be fed data from a corresponding view file — or they can feed data to a view, by way of taking input via a form.

Django’s templating syntax is simple and effective — but a good rule of thumb is to keep as much ‘logic’ away from templates as you can, to keep the code clean and understandable. Any complex processing or filtering should be done either at the model or view level (or potentially, in a template tag) — so when it lands in your actual template, the processing is already done and the front end work is as simple as it can be.

Django has a lot of cool, built-in filtering tools that help you get work done with your data. Worth taking a look at!

Administration system

Django’s automatic administration system is hugely useful — mostly because of the amount of time it saves. It works like this — any app that you construct has it’s own corresponding admin file. Importing the relevant database models into that file, and then dictating how you want those fields laid out visually is all you need to do to create an administration system — because Django will take those components and make them accessible for an administrator (by default, at the /admin URL).

The beauty of this is that unless you want some advanced, custom features, there’s really nothing you need to do. You create some very small admin files and lo and behold — an administration system. How long would that have taken to write on your own?

So, how do I get started with Django?

The Django community is a very active community of highly capable developers, and there are a lot of resources available to get started with.

To demonstrate the simplicity of Django, we’re going to make a simple blogging app. (The final source code is available here: https://github.com/danielsamuels/gcbv-article/ )

To begin, you’ll need to have Python installed, it comes pre-installed on OS X and Linux based systems, so if you’re using either of those, you should already be set. If you’re on Windows you’ll need to go to the Python website to download and install it. Before we install Django, we’re going to create something called a ‘virtual environment’. A virtual environment allows us to isolate the dependencies of a project from the rest of your system so you don’t end up with multiple versions of the same library trying to be loaded at the same time. To start using a virtual environment under Python 2 you’ll need to first install the package: pip install virtualenv. If you’re using Python 3, it comes with a virtual environment system built-in, so we’ll make use of that.

To create the virtual environment on Python 2 run `virtualenv .venv`, to create one on Python 3 use `python3 -m venv .venv`. Once the environment has been created it needs to be activated before it can be used. You can do this by running `. .venv/bin/activate`.

Now we’re all set and ready to install Django without it affecting anything else — simply run `pip install Django`. The latest version will be downloaded and installed. To start using Django we’ll first need to create a project, Django provides a base template, so we’ll make use of that. Run `django-admin startproject blog .` If you view this directory you’ll see that a few new files have been created, these will form the basis of our project.

This is the default project structure for a Django project, it’s the template that Django itself provides for you to use. It’s a great starting point.

What do each of these files do?

There are 4 files which are generated when you run startproject, they are manage.py, settings.py, urls.py and wsgi.py.

The manage.py file is a replacement for the django-admin command we used earlier, it’s your main entry point into your application and it’s what we use to run any management commands related to our project, for example creating an admin user. It’s very rare that you’ll need to edit this file.

The settings.py file contains all of the settings for our project, such as the name of the project, the URL it will live under and so on. We won’t be editing it as part of this process, but it’s worth having a look through it to see what’s in there.

The urls.py the base routing file for all requests which come into Django, it handles mapping the various URLs to their counterpart views. We’ll be editing this later on.
The wsgi.py file is used when you deploy your project to a server. It allows a WSGI HTTP server such as Gunicorn to mount your application and pass HTTP requests through.

Building it out

Now that we have the first files for our project, we’ll start building it out. To keep our workspace clean we’re going to create our application files within a folder in our project, rather than alongside everything else, so go ahead and create a folder called ‘blog’. You’ll also need to create an empty file named __init__.py in this folder so that Python knows it’s a loadable module. Once we have this folder we’ll need to create a “models.py” file inside it which will contain our representation of a blog post. We’ll keep it simple and only include the title and content for now.

from django.db import models class Post(models.Model): title = models.CharField( max_length=100, ) content = models.TextField()

Then we’ll need the individual “views” which take care of receiving the request, working out what needs to be done and then returning a web page. For this we’ll make use of Django’s “Generic Class Based Views” which provide a simple way to perform common tasks. Create a views.py in your blog folder with these contents:

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse from django.views.generic import CreateView, DeleteView, DetailView, ListView, UpdateView from .models import Post class PostListing(ListView): model = Post class PostCreate(CreateView): model = Post success_url = ‘/’
fields = [‘title’, ‘content’] class PostDetail(DetailView): model = Post class PostUpdate(UpdateView): model = Post
fields = [‘title’, ‘content’] def get_success_url(https://medium.com/self): return reverse(‘blog:detail’, kwargs={ ‘pk’: self.object.pk, }) class PostDelete(DeleteView): model = Post success_url = ‘/’

The last file we’ll need in our app folder is urls.py. This will map the URL you visit in your browser to the relevant view in the views.py file. We’re going to use some regular expressions to match values within the URL, all they’re going to do is look for a number and pass it into the view as a ‘pk’ value — primary key — which will be used to find the blog post in the database.

from django.conf.urls import url from .views import PostCreate, PostDelete, PostDetail, PostListing, PostUpdate urlpatterns = [ url(https://medium.com/r%E2%80%99%5E$%E2%80%99,%20PostListing.as_view(), name=’listing’), url(https://medium.com/r%E2%80%99%5Ecreate/$%E2%80%99,%20PostCreate.as_view(), name=’create’), url(https://medium.com/r%E2%80%99%5E(?P<pk>\d+)/$’, PostDetail.as_view(), name=’detail’), url(https://medium.com/r%E2%80%99%5E(?P<pk>\d+)/update/$’, PostUpdate.as_view(), name=’update’), url(https://medium.com/r%E2%80%99%5E(?P<pk>\d+)/delete/$’, PostDelete.as_view(), name=’delete’), ]

There’s a few small things we’ll need to do before our app is integrated into our project. First we need to add the app to the list of installed apps in the settings. So open up settings.py and have a look for INSTALLED_APPS. Add another line with the value ‘blog.blog’ (blog being the name of the project folder and also the name of the app folder). The last thing we’ll need to do is add the blog URLs to the project URLs. Open up the urls.py in the root of your project and add this line underneath the admin line:

url(https://medium.com/r%E2%80%99%5E%E2%80%99,%20include(%E2%80%98blog.blog.urls%E2%80%99,%20namespace=%E2%80%9Dblog%E2%80%9D))

You’ll also need to add `include` to the list of imports from django.conf.urls.

from django.conf.urls import include, url

We now need to let Django know about our new article model so that it knows it needs to create a database table. Go back to your terminal and run python manage.py makemigrations blog. You’ll see it create a file. Then run `python manage.py migrate`, it will turn all of the models in your project into database tables. You should now have everything in place to be able to run the development server, so run `python manage.py runserver`. You’ll see the server start up and direct you towards http://127.0.0.1:8000, which you can then visit.

Django comes with a built-in server to use when developing your application. It makes it very easy to get your projects up-and-running.

You’re going to receive an error saying a template is missing and this is a good thing — it means you’re hitting the correct view (in this case, it’s the PostListing view).

The next thing we’ll do is add all of the templates that we’ll need. We’ll need 4 templates in total: the blog listing, the article detail, the forms and the delete confirmation. We’re going to keep them as simple as possible for now, so go ahead and create these files:

templates/blog/post_confirm_delete.html

<form action=”” method=”post”>
{% csrf_token %}
<input type=”submit”>
</form>

templates/blog/post_detail.html

<h1>{{ post.title }}</h1>
<p>{{ post.content }}</p>

templates/blog/post_form.html

<form action=”” method=”post”>
{% csrf_token %}
{{ form.as_p }}
<input type=”submit”>
</form>

templates/blog/post_list.html

<ul>
{% for post in post_list %}
<li><a href=’{% url “blog:detail” post.pk %}’>{{ post.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Your final structure should look like this:

__init__.py
models.py
urls.py
views.py
templates/blog/post_confirm_delete.html
templates/blog/post_detail.html
templates/blog/post_form.html
templates/blog/post_list.html

If you refresh your browser you should see your working site (note: you may need to restart the development server first). And there you have it, your very first Django-powered blog!

Quick tips
• If you’re going to be working on multiple Python / Django projects, it’s useful to make use of virtual environments to isolate your dependencies. You can run `pip install virtualenv`, `virtualenv .venv`, `. .venv/bin/activate` to start.
• Python comes with a useful program for installing dependencies, it’s called ‘pip’. You can install Django by running `pip install Django`. If you want to share your requirements you can run `pip freeze > requirements.txt` and someone else can run `pip install -r requirements.txt` to install them.
• Django projects work best when they’re split up into manageable chunks, so consider splitting different parts of your project into their own apps, then split the individual components of the app into their own file. You’ll find it becomes much easier to maintain.

Django comes with a built-in server to use when developing your application. It makes it very easy to get your projects up-and-running.

When you run the development server the first time and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000, this is the page you’ll be greeted with.

This is the default project structure for a Django project, it’s the template that Django itself provides for you to use. It’s a great starting point.

Abstracting away complexity

The example code demonstrates how easy Django makes it to develop applications. With less than 30 lines of view code, you’re able to take care of listing news articles, creating new articles, viewing them, updating them and deleting them. This is made possible to the amount of time spent by the Django developers in creating a collection of generic views which are both useful, but also unopinionated. They deliver all of the functionality you require without getting in your way — and if you don’t like the way they’re doing something, you can just override or extend them with your methods. This level of thinking extends across the entire spectrum of Django features, with simplicity and security being the default. Knowing that the framework is doing all of the heavy-lifting leaves you to take care of the application logic, making you more productive and able to deliver projects in a more timely manner.

Managing a business used to mean stacks of paperwork and overflowing inboxes, but thanks to advancements in technology things have changed.

There are digital tools to help business owners manage tasks across most areas of business — here are just a few key services to help streamline communications, project management, social media, data management and more.

Internal communications

Slack

Slack is a web, iPhone, and Android app designed to streamline internal communications and foster collaboration. Conversations are organised in ‘channels’ by project, client or team, or private channels can be set up for sensitive information.

Files can be uploaded and stored in Slack either from your computer or by using the handy Google Drive Integration. Other useful integrations include in-app Skype calls and Wunderlist.

The free version includes 10 apps or service integrations, 5GB of storage for the team and searchable message archives. Slack’s reasonably priced paid plans offer significantly more data and extra features like group voice and video calls and enterprise assurance/integration options.

Project management

Trello

Trello is a project management tool that gives an overview of all ongoing projects within an organisation. It’s a very simple and visual way to show the status of various projects from initial interactions to writing proposals and finally launching a project.

One of the most useful ways to use Trello is as a project progression status board to provide a high-level overview of project status. Trello’s interface is based around a cascading card system where cards are added or assigned to lists. The software lends itself to agile project management frameworks like SCRUM and is a fantastic internal tool.

With free, business class and enterprise pricing models there is a package to suit every organisation.

Social media

Buffer

If you use social media for your business you’ll know how time consuming — and sometimes impossible — it is to keep your feeds populated, especially when you’re away from your desk.

Buffer is a web and mobile-based social media automation app which allows users to schedule posts across the six main social networks. Connect your channels, select your posting times and add your articles — either directly into the app or by using Buffer’s Chrome extension.

The free version gives you one social account per platform and 10 posts per day, per account. There are five further plans from Awesome to Enterprise which range from $10/month to $600/month and offer increasing numbers of social accounts, team members and posts.

File sharing & storage

G Suite

Cloud-based tools that aid collaboration are becoming the norm and Google is hard to beat.

G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work) is a set of tools which allows businesses to communicate with teams, store files and collaborate with colleagues.

Combining domain management, user management, email, calendar, instant messaging, and shared documents, G Suite blows the competition out of the water. It’s even possible to create a company intranet through Google Sites, with no design or programming experience.

The basic plan starts at $5/user per month for 30GB of cloud storage and the business plan offers unlimited cloud storage for $10/user per month, along with enhanced features.

Website performance

Google Analytics

It’s vital to understand how people find your website and how they use it if you want to maximise site performance, and while there are many web analytics tools out there Google Analytics is hard to beat.

By implementing a Google tracking code businesses can track and measure their marketing and SEO efforts. Google Analytics provides a range of detailed metrics including how you acquired visitors, their path throughout your site, site loading speed and which devices are being used to view it.

The free version is more than adequate for most small/medium sized businesses. Premium service, Google 360, can handle far bigger volumes of data and multiple websites.

HR

Kin HR

Managing employees and their data is a crucial part of any business but can be a huge time drain without the right tools.

Kin HR is an intuitive online tool which streamlines HR for entire teams. It has a good balance between features and price and is a simple way to handle employee file and data management, time-off tracking and onboarding new employees at a fraction of the cost of big enterprise HR systems. Kin also makes it easy for staff to be self-sufficient by allowing them to upload persona data, requests and tasks.

Kin HR is well thought out, enjoyable to use and with an affordable and simple pricing scheme ($5 per user per month) Kin HR is great value for money.

This is just a small selection of the many tools out there, but some of the best we’ve found. If you want to recommend any great digital tools let us know in the comments.

This article originally appeared in the Sage Blog.

Design and tech is constantly evolving, from an explosion in image-led design to the acceptance and dominance of scrolling — and technology continues to develop at warp speed. Our team looks at other trends that are shaping digital.

Thomas Rumbold — Head of Operations

Consumer Fintech

FinTech in the last 24 months has evolved from an industry buzz-phrase to a burgeoning industry of small, agile organisations — looking to leverage innovative, high-performing technologies to take a slice of the enormous financial industry. Apps like Monzo, Moneybox, and established services like Nutmeg are putting consumers at the heart of the banking and investment space, and we’ll continue to see brave new innovation in the sector, much to the dismay of the large corporate banks.

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality was one of 2016’s huge technology movements, and the evolution of the space from a niche technology to mainstream, consumer-focused represents a broader shift that we’re yet to see. We’ll see further applications of VR in gaming, training, military and industrial capacities — as well as tight integration with other disciplines like artificial intelligence.

James Dellar — Creative Director

Augmented reality

AR is the amalgamation of digital data or UI components overlaid in the real word by interacting with a mobile device or headset. While you may not have heard much about AR, you would definitely have heard of Pokemon GO. Players downloaded this game millions of times and have collectively walked around the Earth more than 200,000 times trying to catch imaginary animals. While VR has taken the media by storm lately, AR has been lurking in the shadows building the foundation of what is going to be commonplace over the next few years.

The concept has come a long way since Google Glass and I believe that in certain scenarios this will be used in common work practice. We can already see how much investment platforms like Magic leap have received ($1.39B in 3 Rounds from 15 Investors ) — and they don’t even have a product out yet! This video of a prototype of their work shows one potential application.

Over the next few years this technology will be part of everyday lives and smart devices/PCs will purely power visual tools to enable you to see the new digital world. Microsoft have positioned themselves well in this market with Hololens — yes, it’s expensive for early adopters, but then so were the first first cars and TVs…

George Hadfield — Senior Designer

Use of colour

User interfaces are getting increasingly vibrant with very rich colour tones. The last 12 months of so saw web designers experimenting with gradients, bright hues and oversaturated colours. Expect to see more of the same as screens and monitors are becoming more advanced and able to reproduce more vibrant colours.

Typography

Typography has always set the tone and style of websites, helping add character and personality. The tail of 2016 saw designers experiment with big and bold typefaces, which marries well with the introduction of more vibrant colours.

Chiara Mensa — Designer

Diversity in design

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about how web design appears to have lost its soul because of the wide array of very similar websites going live everyday. With this in mind, I think we will see a bigger push towards making designs stand out and feel unique by focusing the attention to the primary building blocks. Designers will shy away more decisively from stock photography and video, favouring bespoke imagery and carefully-crafted illustrations.

Moreover, a stronger effort will be placed in using more unique and original typefaces and trying not to always go for the easy options (I’m looking at you Google Fonts).

Robert Korodi — Junior Designer

More creative use of code-based user interactions

Because people have devices with better performance the definition of accessible technology for a given target audience is changing constantly. Code-based (WebGL) animations and parallax image scrolling are running smoother and smoother on our current laptops and tablets so there’s a huge potential to introduce these features to sectors that didn’t have a chance to use them before. If these features are combined with thoughtful design they can transform the users’ experience. When it’s done well there’s a simple reason why they work so well: when an object on a seemingly static site is reactive to the user’s mouse movements people react back to it instinctively. These techniques are not a necessity to create a great website but when you look at them as additional tools for enabling creativity in web-design, these relatively new opportunities are definitely good way to go.

Daniel Samuels — Lead Developer

Slack

The meteroic rise of Slack will likely be followed by a tapering off, and perhaps a decline, in usage of the popular business communication app. With many workers feeling overwhelmed by the volume of real-time conversation happening and a sense that if they don’t read and respond immediately then their chance to contribute is missed, it makes sense that organisations might begin to look back to traditional communication tools such as email or Basecamp. With some key features still missing from Slack (such as threaded messaging) there will likely be a tipping point where companies begin to reconsider their use of real-time communications.

Data

With an ever-increasing amount of our private data being collected by Silicon Valley startups and figureheads alike, public opinion will surely begin to shift as people begin to realise the cost of over-sharing. Ephemeral media shared on apps such as Snapchat and Instagram Stories has seen a large rise in usage over the last few years as people to consider the long term effects of their digital personas. With a number of recent controversies / developments in government-level access to data (with Donald Trump taking control of the NSA and the Snooper’s Charter being passed in the UK), it’s likely that people will be more cautious with the amount of information placed into the public realm. We may also see a shift in the data retention policies by websites themselves, to try and limit the data which can be requested by authorities.

VR

We will likely see the release of the second generation home VR kits in the next 12 months (Rift, Vive, OSVR, etc) with perhaps wireless display data. At the moment there’s a snake of cables you have attached to the user, so wireless technology would vastly improve this. I think we’re also going to see VR on the web, there’s a proposed API called WebVR which is likely to become available in the stable release channels of Chrome and Firefox next year, so we’ll see a lot of cool stuff coming out of that.)

Lewis Collard — Developer

HTTPS encryption

I predict that we will begin to see the rise of ubiquitous HTTP encryption. First, global political uncertainties are causing many more people to question the wisdom of state surveillance. People who may have previously thought of it as a necessary evil are seeing that machinery, predictably, fall into the hands of people who they have good reason to fear. And the tightening ratchet of surveillance, in which the British state granting everyone from MI6 to the Food Standards Agency access to your browsing history will neither be the last nor most egregious example, is rendering the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ crowd increasingly thin. (How’s your browsing history looking?)

These trends coincide with driving down the overhead of obtaining and maintaining SSL certificates to, practically, zero. By the end of the year, it is not unreasonable to expect the overwhelming majority of top-1000 sites to be using encrypted HTTP connections.

Don’t know your SERPs (search engine results pages) from your PPC (pay per click)? Not sure when you should be favouriting on Instagram or pinning on Pinterest? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.

Digital marketing is an umbrella term that refers to the promotion of products and brands via electronic media. It’s how a brand uses its social profiles, websites and apps to promote itself.

So what are the different types of digital media you might use and how can you use them? These tools can be split into often interchangeable sectors, including search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, display ads and email marketing.

Email marketing

We’re all familiar with promotional emails that land in our inbox, but it’s not as simple as throwing email addresses and some offers into an email distribution tool (such asMailchimp) and hoping for the best. The people who do this well segment their audience to make every email relevant to the group that receives it. They’re experts at data collection and they know lots about heat maps, which track the percentage of people who have interacted with different parts of a webpage — and open rates, which show what percentage of the people who received your email have opened it.

Display advertising

Display ads are part of the paid branch of digital marketing. They are image and, often, audio-­led ads that pop up on web pages. They can be effective but need to be used carefully — you don’t want to annoy your customers.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing can take two distinct forms: paid and organic. Paid marketing includes Facebook and Twitter promoted posts and ads. Facebook can be a particularly effective tool as you can be very specific with targetting, choosing who sees your ads or promoted posts on their Facebook feed based on their age, gender, interests and the type of device they use. Most social media platforms have some form of paid promotion like this.

Content marketing

This can be done using paid media such as display ads, social ads, Google ads, earned media (relationships you build with others who help promote your content) and owned media (your website, app and social media channels). The content can take many forms — text, images, gifs, video — and the form it takes will play a huge part in where you place it.

Search engine optimisation

SEO is probably the most misunderstood element of digital marketing. In the past it has always been interchangeable with content marketing (or what was known as link building — a key part of SEO). This is still the case to an extent, but the two are starting to separate.

SEO is optimising your site to rank as highly as possible in search engines. Google, in determining where your site ranks, takes into account 200­ or so factors, including site speed, backlinks (links pointing to your site), social media signals and site usability.

Finally

The sheer number of factors Google considers for site ranking goes some way to illustrate the complexity of SEO. However, a well-structured, user-friendly website with high quality, regularly updated content will always be beneficial to search engine rankings.

This is adapted from an article we wrote for The Guardian Small Business Network. Read the full article here.

By Onespacemedia’s Lead Developer, Daniel Samuels

2015 was a fantastic year for the development team at Onespacemedia (read more here). We innovated, iterated and improved every aspect of our day-to-day work. We pushed the boundaries of web animations, innovated in new ways to deliver structured content, and continued to create accessible, user-friendly web experiences regardless of platform.

In 2016 we are going to build on this foundation. We’ve come a long way so far, but we’ve got a strong vision of where would would like to be by the end of this year.

The first thing we want to change is our deployment process. We started a continuous integration flow at the end of 2015 and we’re keen to extend the functionality to include automatic deployments upon successful builds. A large part of this change will be to use Docker to containerize our applications and allow for fast, zero-to-low downtime deployments. We were very careful in choosing our continuous integration provider, as we knew this was going to be a key feature for us in the years to come. That’s why we went with with CircleCI, who have Docker deployments as a primary feature of their product offering. We want to have developers just writing, committing and pushing code without worrying about the intricacies of managing servers and running shell scripts to get things working; it will all be taken care of automatically.

The second change we’re going to be making is to break out commonly requested features into reusable models for our CMS. While each of our sites is customised for every client, there are often similar features between sites, so creating a collection of reusable abstract code will allow us to improve our startup time and reduce the amount of code we have to re-write for every project. In addition to this, making use of the same base code allows us to have confidence in the code, knowing that it has been production tested, with improvements flowing back into the base module. At the same time as improving the workflow of developers building the site’s code, we want to improve the user experience for the administrators of the website, so we’ll be looking into ways we can improve user journeys within the administration system and optimise their time when managing site content.

Our third priority for this year is providing developers with a well structured guide to development at Onespacemedia. This guide will include topics such as code style and quality, recommended configurations for software, and anything a developer would need in their day-to-day work life. We will make this a publically-viewable document in the hope that it might help others improve their internal documentation too.

Another item on the list for this year is to hold regular developer catch-ups, where developers can have a 1-to-1 with the lead developer (that’s me!), as well as have a group chat to see how things are going. Hopefully this will highlight any problems as they arise, provide regular updates on progress, and generally help keep things running smoothly.

By Onespacemedia’s Lead Developer, Daniel Samuels

The development team at Onespacemedia saw a lot of changes in 2015. We grew to 4 members, and we launched the largest number of websites of the highest level of quality and innovation that we’ve ever had. To support our growth and evolution we had to improve every aspect of our day-to-day workflow.

The first step was to update our project template, something we use to springboard every new project. Our project template comes with a well-thought-out file structure and is configured with a whole host of settings which allow us to extend the functionality of any given project, as well as configure different environments in different ways. Some of the services we added support for by default included Sentry, Opbeat, Mailtrap, Adobe SDK and Google+ (for authentication). In addition to adding support for APIs and services in the backend, we also added a lot of dynamic front-end variables such as analytics keys. We added conditionals to our base templates to check for the existence of various API keys and automatically output the relevant integration code on the front-end, which helps to reduce repetition and increase overall productivity.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes for us in 2015 was moving our hosting over to DigitalOcean. Previously we made use of Webfaction, which allows you to get up-and-running fairly quickly, but did not have the flexibility we needed. In addition, we were having to follow multi-page instructions to get sites configured properly, which was costing many unnecessary hours. This was compounded by excessive downtime and an unwieldy administration system, so we began the process of moving sites across to servers on DigitalOcean (known as droplets) which we configured and maintained. We made use of Fabric and Ansible to automate the deployment process, and while this did not go as smoothly as we would have liked, we iterated quickly and soon had a solid collection of server management tools which would allow us to deploy, update and interact with servers with ease. With the improvements to both the project template and the server management tools, we were able to go from having no project files at all, to having a fully hosted CMS within 10–15 minutes — and with the plans we have going forward into 2016, this time should decrease even further.

An advantage of moving onto servers that you control is being able to take advantage of modern libraries and packages without being restricted by what is available to you on shared hosting. We took full advantage of our new-found freedom and brought our application environment into the 21st century, including making use of Pythonvirtual environments to create reproducible installations and using a service stack ofGunicorn, supervisor and nginx to run our applications. In addition to improving the back-end stack, we re-evaluated our front-end systems, lead by Dan Gamble in his new role as a dedicated front-end developer — look out for a blog post on this process in the near future. We stripped away the monolithic Foundation framework and replaced it with a lightweight flexbox driven grid system, and evaluated various different class prefixing schemas before finally settling on one which made the most sense for us.

One of the bigger changes towards the end of the year was to change our Git repository hosting provider. Our history with Git hosting has been a fairly unusual one; from hosting the Git repo on the application servers, to hosting our own centralised Git remote, then to Bitbucket private repositories — which is what we used for the majority of 2015. Unfortunately towards the end of 2015 we started to have a fair amount of trouble with Bitbucket — particularly around uptime and reliability — so we evaluated our options for a move. We already hosted all of our open-source work onGithub, so we decided our best option was to also host our client code there. This move allowed us to have all of our code in one place — perhaps somewhat against the general decentralised model of Git, though we have at least 5 versions of the codebases amongst the development team. One of the other Git-related changes we made was to make use of ‘Git flow’, which sees us maintaining a ‘develop’ branch for work-in-progress and feature branches for when we’re working on new features for a project. We’ve found this to work extremely well for us and we’ll be continuing to use it for the foreseeable future.

The final change of the year was to begin to introduce a continuous integration flow for our projects. For the longest time our projects have been fairly self-policed, but as we grow as a team, it’s important to have some ground rules and procedures in place regarding code quality and style, so we decided to make CircleCI part of our workflow. Whenever a commit is pushed to a project, CircleCI automatically runs tests and checks both the back and front-end code against a set of style criteria. We decided to use isort and flake8 for the Python code, and eslint and jslint (using standard-js as a baseline) for the front-end code. So far we’ve found it works well, with the next logical step being that we integrate it into a pre-commit hook for projects.

In my next blog post, I’ll talk about our plans for 2016 and how we are looking to improve our efficiency and workflow going forwards.

Posted in General news, Opinion

Blogs are an invaluable resource to us at Onespacemedia, keeping us up to date with the latest digital trends, inspiring creativity and providing a forum for discussion with the design community. Here are our design team’s recommendations for the best design resources out there.

James Dellar, Creative Director

Because I have to stay up to date across a broad range of media I use Prismatic to collate my interests. Prismatic pulls together articles being shared by my community within defined categories so it’s a great way of accessing a broad range of targeted content.

I also use a Chrome extension called Panda to collate a wide range of blogging platforms straight into my home tab, these include Product Hunt for startup news, Designer News (created by LayerVault) Dribbble, Awwwards and The Next Web — which is great for tech news.

Some of my favourite design-specific blogs are:

Aisle One

A great resource which has a focus on graphic design, typography and grid systems.

Swiss Miss

Run by Tina Roth Eisenberg — aka Swiss Miss — what started out as a personal online archive has grown to become a hugely popular design blog attracting over 1 million unique users a month. Swiss Miss is a fantastic resource for just about anything creative. Just filter by the vast choice of interests and you’re good to go. Run by Tina Roth Eisenberg it also incorporates CreativeMornings — a free breakfast lecture event based on a global theme that is run in 120 cities around the world — well worth checking out.

Under Consideration

Since is was founded in 2002 Under Consideration has launched six sites that have been that both encourage discussion in and celebrate different aspects of design — Speak Up, Brand New, Quipsologies, The Design Encyclopedia, Word It, and FPO. My favourite is Brand New — a platform that allows designers to give their opinions on major brand indentity projects.

George Hadfield, Designer

I tend to stick my faithful blogs for user experience inspiration and support. These two are hard to beat.

Studio by UXPin

Studio features tons of credible UI/UX tutorials, articles and ebooks that ultimately save designers time and effort — everything from prototyping to best practices (and everything in between).

Their blog is bang up to date with with expertise and the latest UI/UX trends with posts from some of the best in the business, including UX content strategist Jerry Cao.

Stack Exchange

UX Stack Exchange is a great Q&A forum for the web community. It started out as a development only community but has gained an audience across various web disciplines, including UX (my channel of choice!). The community is really engaged and it’s a great resource for problem solving.

Chiara Mensa, Designer

I tend to use a mixture of Twitter lists and blogs to stay up to date with things. My Twitter lists allow me to quickly skim through what’s getting the design community talking. It’s very immediate so extremely powerful as a news resource.

My go-to blogs are:

The Collective on Codrops

I like how their weekly issues always manage to cover things that have gone under my radar. They are great at featuring little hidden gems of content and they have a lot of variety, from opinion pieces to freebies and tutorials

A List Apart

A List Apart is full of truly insightful pieces that are very in-depth, albeit a bit technical. It covers design, development, and the meaning of web content, focussing on web standards and best practices. A great companion for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Designmodo

This is a much lighter read, more tutorial and design resource oriented. It’s a great way to expand your skillset — just pick a tutorial about some new design technique/trend and getting your hands dirty!

We hope you’ve found our suggestions useful. Maybe you have some fantastic resources of your own — we’d love to hear from you.

Follow us on Twitter.

Originally published at www.onespacemedia.com

It has been rumoured today that Twitter is about to create a product that banishes its much-loved 140 character limit in an effort to entice new users — much to the dismay of the Twitter community.

So what is it about a tweet’s word economy that works so well? And what will the network become if/when it allows posts that would give War & Peace a run for its money?

For me, the beauty of the humble tweet lies in the power of brevity. Whether we’re tweeting about web design or general goings on at the agency, character restrictions force us to work a bit harder to create punchier posts — compressing thoughts into bite-size morsels. To some, tweeting is an art in itself — but in any case, scanning a feed of 140-character tweets allows us to digest more content in a limited amount of time — which lends itself perfectly to the immediacy of the channel, and its ability to spread messages far and wide at warp speed.

Then there’s the question of how Twitter will look if the rumours are true. The Twitterati have certainly made their feelings known. The enforced character limit is what differentiates Twitter from Facebook. Will we be subjected to blow-by-blow accounts of family holidays and beloved pets’ trips to the vets?

Here’s what the Twitterverse had to say:

twitter might remove the 140 character limit so i’m putting some 800 word tweets with character development & plot twists in my drafts — Desus Nice (@desusnice) September 30, 2015

twitter getting rid of the 140-character limit is a bad idea. the ability to say what you need to say in as few words as possible is (1/533) — andy levy (@andylevy) September 29, 2015

Twitter plans to exceed 140-char limit. My advice: don’t make it a “new product”, bake it into Twitter proper. http://t.co/PKugGQdhU1 — kottke.org (@kottke) September 29, 2015

Pushing the character limit over 140 could very well prove to be Twitter’s gradual demise. Brevity has held the charm here for us. — Shakti Shetty (@Shakti_Shetty) September 29, 2015

I desperately want Twitter to keep the 140 character limit because it ensures brevity and encourages us all to really think about what we sa — Mark Wallace (@wallaceme) September 30, 2015

It remains to be seen how this product will roll out — if indeed it does — but one thing is for sure: the enforced character limit is part of the fabric of Twitter’s identity and, if its users are to be believed, it would be sorely missed.

What do you think?

Source: Re/Code

Originally published at www.onespacemedia.com on September 30, 2015.

Let’s begin by dispelling a myth; Pinterest is not a social network — just ask co-founder Evan Sharp. It’s not about catching up with friends, and it isn’t even about engagement — at least not in the same way as Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest is essentially a search engine; a tool for discovering and sharing ideas, and collecting them in digital scrapbooks — with a focus on the future, rather than the past (Facebook) or present (Twitter).

Having shaken off its reputation for being a recipe-sharing platform, savvy businesses now see Pinterest as a valuable — and unique — marketing tool that can send you more referral traffic than Twitter. But how can companies get the most from it?

Exactly how you use Pinterest will depend entirely on the nature of your business and your objectives, but Pinterest can help drive traffic and growth while building your brand personality — whatever industry you’re in.

Check out our Pinterest boards

An overview

Pinterest is essentially a visual (and/or aural) representation of your brand and gives a unique opportunity for your business to communicate and connect with its audience. It’s a growing web and mobile platform with 70 million users globally, which allows users to collect, organise and share inspiring images, videos and audio files (pins). Pins are saved to boards using the Pin It button, allowing you to collate and organise your files by theme or topic. By inviting other team members to contribute to boards, they become a hugely valuable collaborative resource which can either be shared openly or privately between group members.

Because a user’s Pinterest page can potentially cover a range of topics Pinterest allows users to follow either an account or individual boards. Boards can therefore attract more followers than users themselves.

What’s really valuable about Pinterest is the scope for exposure through repinning. Repins are the Pinterest equivalent of a retweet — an opportunity to have your pins shared not just with your community of followers, but with your followers’ community and beyond. But, like social networks, sharing/repinning is a two-way street. Repinning other users’ images triggers a notification to the original pinner, building awareness of your account and your brand and an opportunity to build your Pinterest community. If you’re lucky they may even reciprocate, extending your reach even further.

Search Engine Optimisation is an often overlooked but powerful aspect of Pinterest marketing. For example, entering source URLs directly into pins gives you the opportunity to send traffic back to your own website. Find out more about maximising your SEO potential here.

So, how can businesses use Pinterest? As I said earlier, it depends on the nature of the business and what you’re trying to achieve but here are a few ideas:

• Share your company blog and newsletters
• Provide tips on how to use your product
• Give expert advice for getting started with your product or service
  publish industry information that shows people what to expect from your service.
• Share webinars, podcasts or video from company events

Let’s look at some possible uses a bit more closely.

Humanise your brand

People do business with people, not faceless corporations and Pinterest is the perfect platform for showing the personalities behind your company while communicating your brand values. Create a board for staff members, take photos at a company event or give a peek behind the scenes of office life to give a sense of your culture, and the people behind your brand.

E-commerce

Pinterest is made for e-commerce and it’s about to become even more powerful when buyable pins start rolling out in the US in late June. Buyable pins will allow shoppers to make purchases without ever having to leave the app, a feature with the potential to transform Pinterest into an e-commerce powerhouse. When combined with promoted pins — Pinterest’s paid advertising model — there are even more revenue-driving opportunities.

Useful e-commerce stats:

• 93% of pinners shopped online in the past six months
• Pins with prices get 36% more likes than those without
• Images without faces attract 23% more repins
• Pinterest will NOT take a cut of retailers’ profits — for now at least

Sell your brand and services

If you’re trying to describe a product that is quite literally rocket science, use Pinterest to demystify the technology behind it, communicate its features and give tips on how to use it. Remember, Pinterest is not just about images, boards can contain videos too — choose whichever best suits your brand or mix them up a bit.

Provide tips on how to use your product, advice for getting started with your service, or industry information that shows your audience what to expect from you.

Publish statistics

Company stats needn’t be boring. Web apps like infogram can transform your sales figures into gorgeous, Pinterest-ready visuals and infographics.

Be creative!

The most creative use of Pinterest we’ve seen is Uniqlo’s promotion of a new product which involved many people pinning images simultaneously to create a unique scrolling effect. The campaign resulted in global media coverage and all for free! Check out the case study:

Whatever your industry, Pinterest provides powerful and unique opportunities to give a visual or aural dimension to your brand and its services as well as a powerful boost to your SEO. We’d love to hear about examples of Pinterest being used effectively — let us know in the comments. And check out our Pinterest page!

Sources: Shopify, Shareaholic

Author: Nicky Hughes

Originally published at www.onespacemedia.com.

Guest copywriter and chief copywriter at Sookio, Rory Stobo, breaks down the challenge of writing on a diverse range of topics while still sounding like an expert.

As a copywriter for a digital content agency, I pick up fresh challenges every day. We’re lucky enough to work with a mix of clients, from healthcare brands and Government departments to retailers specialising in luxury Italian furniture or products to tame an unruly beard.

Part of that is due to our location here in historic Cambridge; the heart of Silicon Fen is home to some of the most qualified, visionary minds in the UK tech scene. For a lot of these organisations, time constraints prevent them from giving their web presence the attention it deserves. Their in-house teams might lack cutting-edge expertise in writing for the web, or else they just can’t put the distance between themselves and their product required to really engage customers. So they come to us.

That’s all great, but it can pose a problem when a brief lands on my desk detailing some new innovation that makes as much sense to my Neanderthal man-mind as the inner workings of the USS Enterprise. My time is my client’s time, so how best to use it effectively and produce good work on a topic that’s entirely unfamiliar?

From dunce to don

The job is to write, not to reinvent the wheel. I always ask clients for a set of bullet points detailing what they want a given piece to cover. These are my research notes and, more often than not, they set out just what I need to say. Remember, you don’t need an opinion on this stuff, the client has that. Yours is the job of the translator.

I find that a lot of academic or technically-minded types have trouble expressing their ideas in plain English, simply because they’re so deeply immersed in a specific body of knowledge. By keeping their guidance streamlined you can cut straight to what they’re really trying to say.

Don’t consider research time to be wasted time just because you’re not actively producing the piece. If it saves you having to write something twice in future edits, it’s a valid investment. Skim some of the biggest blogs in your client’s industry for a rough idea of what kind of dialogue is current and exciting to them.

Stick with the brand

Look into your client’s branding. You can spend all day painstakingly researching any given sector, but if information is factually correct but presented off-brand, it’s still wrong. Get to know their social media presence for clues about what they might, or simply wouldn’t say.

For example, one of our clients produces a nutritional supplement; it’s important to be aware of what regulations say you can and can’t claim about the product, while still promoting it in an engaging way.

Alternatively, it could be that existing branding has built up so much over the years that it needs trimming away to get back to basics. I like to sit down with a client at the beginning of a project and have them explain their product out loud like they would to a friend. It also helps to ask them about their competitors, who they feel is doing well in the same space and what they like or don’t like about their online presence.

In many ways, writing for someone else is like playing a role. I wrote a post about how you can turn that to your advantage with ‘method copywriting,’ and being in the right frame of mind can stop you feeling intimidated by a new and complicated topic.

Take a bite-sized approach

Above all else, don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. Break the job down into topics and sub-topics. A good blog, for example, should address one subject in enough detail to be interesting, but with enough of the big picture to be self-contained. The same goes for each individual page on a site.

You don’t actually have to become an expert on your client’s field. You just need to sound like an expert on one tiny bit of it at a time and understand where to put the emphasis. Limit the scope of your research, how many ‘steps’ away from the subject matter you allow yourself to stray. Forget what your tutor told you in college, Wikipedia is your friend when it comes to getting a reasonable insight into industry-specific terms. Just be sure to check the references.

Let’s recap

Producing great writing, no matter who for, is a matter of technique as much as it’s about knowing your onions. With a few simple tricks up your sleeve, you can make sure you waste no time stressing over the niggling fact that you know nothing about molecular biology. Remember to:

• get bullet points from your client to pin down what they want covered
• skim over leading industry blogs to see what’s in vogue
• understand your client’s branding and tone of voice
• break down a topic into manageable chunks and address each one logically.

For the journeyman copywriter, there is no law higher than writing what people want to read, so hopefully this has given you some idea of how to address any topic with the same confidence that you’d use to write about your breakfast.

Have you got any tips of your own to share? What’s the most intimidating topic you’ve had to cover? Leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter and let me know.

Sookio is a digital agency based in Cambridge which helps clients communicate with confidence through quality web content and social media. Sign up to their newsletter for a monthly blast of tips and tricks.

Originally published at www.onespacemedia.com.