He deserves it too. The past year has seen Captain Parks appear in his very own TV advert, get discussed on Real Radio North West, and engage with his customers through his Twitter account @CaptainParks. At the same time www.jetparks.co.uk has been firmly established across the major search engine for all its primary keywords, delivered a 20% click to conversion rate, which has in turn resulted in a 465% return on investment and seen bookings exceed targets by 33%. If this wasn’t enough, the JetParks project has been shortlisted for the Best E-Business Project at the 2010 Big Chip Awards.

So, all in all, a busy year for Captain Parks and JetParks, I’m sure you would agree.

When we began the JetParks project over 12 month ago, we had merely 3 weeks in which to deliver the website, so although we wanted to create a visually aesthetic site, a great deal of the limited time we had available was spent in the development of the booking system and all the other clever under the bonnet techie stuff. That is not to say we weren’t happy with our original design, and the Manchester Airport parking public have certainly embraced the brand, but it was felt, now that the site has proved such a success, that we could revisit the original concept and devote a little more time to the look and feel.

We felt it was better to evolve the design rather than starting again from the ground up. A website is organic and design forms part of that. We started by refreshing the home page and some of the other internal pages, with a refresh of the booking process coming shortly. The design has a bright, bubbly feel all in line with the brand. The Quick Booking area has also been simplified to help the user straight into the booking process, which we hope will further increase the already excellent conversion rate.

We feel that the new design give the site a fresh feel without any drastic alteration to the brand, but please have a look around the site yourself www.jetparks.co.uk and let us know what you think.

The Technique Mission

Technique provide a fresh approach to training and development for digital designers and developers by organising events that are intensive, intimate and hands-on, helping to maximise time. More intimate and in-depth than a conference, and more dynamic than traditional training, Technique is all about practical, hands-on development.

Running in Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester, Tech Days are single day intensive workshops led by renowned international developers. Tech Days give you the chance to get in-depth and hands-on with the subject of your choice, learning from experts and fellow developers in a full-day of hands-on training.

Continued support for new developments in the North

KMP Digitata is always excited to support new innovative thinking and ways to help the development of the digital sector in our region. We previously sponsored Speak the Web, which proved a great success, and we see Technique Tech days as another great opportunity for both established and new members of the industry to learn from a variety of experts in these workshops.

As a company KMP Digitata are extremely proud that Richard Clark was invited to teach at this event, strengthening both KMP’s and Richard’s position as a leading authority in web design in the North.

Rich Clark had this to say:

I’m really excited to be involved with Technique Digital. It’s a great opportunity to educate designers and developers on the possibilities of HTML5. I’ve heard really good things about the previous Technique events so hope to continue that trend.

For more information or to book tickets to the events visit Technique. KMP Digitata and Rich Clark look forward to seeing you there.

The Manchester Business Club is a partnership between Manchester Airport and MIDAS, the Manchester Investment and Development Agency, and aims to bring together an exclusive network of businesses and individuals who have, or aspire to have, strong links between Manchester and Singapore and the wider area of South East Asia. Commencing with the launch in Singapore the Manchester Business Club will aim to hold an event a year in each of 5 key locations, in addition to a number of small functions, with the goal of forging strong relationships between Manchester and the Far East.

The Manchester Business Club website had to reflect this message, not only in design, but also in build, a tough task in any agency’s book when from brief to delivery you have 7 working days!

Design & Build

Luckily we had the benefit of an existing brand and collateral, to base our creative treatment on courtesy of brochures produced by Creative Lynx. A photo shoot jaunt to Singapore would have made a severe dent in our delivery time not to mention the overall cost of the project. Using a different dynamic image in the background helps the site to look fresh and interesting throughout. The partner logos being fixed to the bottom of the browser means that the direct brand association between the event and its partners is retained.

It would have been easy to produce a “cut and shut” job that delivered a message but left little scope for future development, but this is not our style, and after all we have reputation to uphold. So we built the site using HTML5 markup which guaranteed its future proofing and allowed us to flex our front end development muscles a little. To complement the HTML5 we also added some ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles which ensured added accessibility for users.

Dinner Time

So with the website complete, looking good, working well, it was delivered in time for dinner. However, this is just the starter, with more to come for the main and desert in the coming weeks. We’ll keep you posted.

All about browsers

To start with, so we’re all on a level playing field I thought we ought to describe what a browser is, so for those that don’t know:

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser

So what exactly is graded browser support?

By their very nature different browsers will render pages and sites differently. This is be because the specifications have been interpretted differently and because of visual aspects such as form fields that have different border colours or shapes. Graded browser support is the process of providing a level of support for browsers in relation to the features they can can or cannot display. This in no way should affect the ability for a user to access the content though, it is primarily for visual appearance.

At KMP we’ve begun implementing graded browser support on almost all of our recent projects. The reasons for this are wide and varied but include: helping our clients save money by cutting down on our development time and allowing us to learn and use up and coming technologies such as HTML 5 and CSS3. Companies like Yahoo have been doing this for a while and have implemented graded browser support tables.

Let’s look at an example

If you are viewing this site in a browser like Firefox or Safari you will see the main content areas have rounded corners and have some transparency, however if you’re viewing the site in Internet Explorer the content areas have square corners and a solid fill colour, this is what we mean by graded browser support. It has also been called Progressive Enhancement or Graceful Degredation.

Why should websites look different in different browsers?

A primary reason for websites looking different between browsers is that by doing so we can cut down development time, which helps both us and our customers save money. For example, if I needed to create the exact same layout of this site for Internet Explorer 6 I would have to either use Javascript or write a lot more HTML. Jeremy Keith wrote a good article about this last year on 24ways.

Another reason for browsers not having to look the same is that our users are primarily interested in the content of our sites not how it looks. This is especially true with the content distribution taking place with RSS feed, meaning that a user may not even visit your site to read your content, it could be viewed in Google Reader, Bloglines or any other RSS aggregator.

Conclusion

To wrap up, it’s our belief at KMP that sites should be usable and acccessibile across all browsers and devices but they don’t have to look identical. You don’t have to just take our word for it though, even the government’s own guidelines say the same thing.

You should check that the content, functionality and display all work as intended. However, there may be minor differences in the way that the website is displayed. The intent is not that it should be pixel perfect across browsers, but that a user of a particular browser does not notice anything appears wrong.

http://www.coi.gov.uk/guidance.php?page=212

We’d love to know your thoughts on whether browsers should look the same in every browser, so why not get the discussion going by leaving a comment below.