Strategy, Scoping and Specification

When creating a new website, be it for a totally new project or to relaunch an existing site, the first and most important thing to do is to develop an online strategy. Instead of thinking “what things do I want” you need to think “what things do I want to achieve“. Refined Practice can work with […]

Clients & Testimonials

We aim to achieve long-term results, working with clients to gradually change their online presence so that it creates the best possible impact. We can start from nothing or help steer an existing brand in the right direction depending on your company’s current situation.

Technical Consulting

Even companies with an in-house web team need a little help from time to time. Refined Practice specialise in solving those knotty online issues that you don’t have the time or experience to be able to easily fix yourself. We can provide strategic guidance on pretty much any online issue you can think of, helping […]

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 […]

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 […]

Brief Trip to ionSearch 2013: Geo-location, E-Commerce and More

Another year, and another trip to ionSearch, a web optimisation conference up in Leeds, UK. This time sadly a brief visit, just the Thursday and only the latter half of it. You can probably still get a sense of what’s been happening via the #ionsearch hash tag. Multi-lingual Sites and Geo-Location I only saw a […]

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 […]

Tips for Choosing a Typeface

With as many typefaces as stars in the sky, how do you come to a decision of which typeface to use for your project? Here are some useful areas of thought that we would consider when starting to put design ideas together … Context – In what environment will the type be used? Will your chosen typeface […]