Blog

Two years ago The Pixel Parlour was founded on the simple premise that there was a better way to design and develop websites for start-ups and small businesses. We believed that technologies like Responsive Design and research practices such as Usability Testing should be in reach of companies who don’t necessarily have five-figure website budgets.

To make this a reality we’ve had to think afresh about the processes behind creating truly effective websites and have shaped our own unique approach, embracing what is new and genuinely adds value for our clients and their customers and jettisoning anything that doesn’t.

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A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a natural next step up for many websites which have out-grown a Shared Hosting solution. As we’ve recently helped a number of clients make the transition up to a VPS we thought we’d share some of the pros and cons to weigh up when considering such a move for your own website.

When a website is starting out Shared Hosting makes a lot of sense. It’s cheap, easy to setup and maintain and really pretty fully-featured. For a lot of small businesses a good Shared Hosting package from a reliable host can serve them well indefinitely. But as a site grows in popularity and/or complexity you might start to bump up against some of the limits of a typical Shared Hosting either in terms of bandwidth allowances, web space or the applications you can install and run. There aren’t any hard and fast rules but if you site attracts more then a couple of thousand visitors a month then the VPS option is probably worth exploring.

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Website Usability Testing is a technique to evaluate the effectiveness of a website design by testing it with real end users.

As designers or website owners we can often be too close to a project and too familiar with how a site functions to identify potential usability issues. By observing real users (ideally from a site’s target audience) performing common site tasks we can quickly identify areas of friction or confusion within a design and resolve them. Usability Testing can also be combined with Emotional Response and Recall tests to build up a wider user experience picture. (more…)