About USdigital

The new Tyre Parks website has gone live.Tyre Parks based in Oadby, south of Leicester, provide fixed outdoor play provisions that are affordable, quality, safe and offer a range of creative and physical activity.

The unique service allows tyre parks to be placed in areas of limited space, either on grass or on a playground, in any design.

Tyre Parks in schools are becoming increasingly popular with more than 3000 Tyre Parks in schools across the UK

The Tyre Parks website , designed and built by USdigital showcases the company’s tyre parks, along with the soft bond play surface they offer. 

Meanwhile USdigital also produced ‘a design your own tyre park’ flash application, allowing a website user to design their own tyre park and send in.

For more information on Usdigital’s services please email ryder@usdigital.co.uk

Designers have known about it for some time now. Developer’s have known about it for years.

Internet Explorer 6 - still one of the world’s most popular browsers - continues to cause web design headaches nearly a decade after it was released, and remains the bane of a developer’s bug-fixing workload, and hindrance to a designer’s creativity.

Sluggish, with broken implementation of standards, lacking advanced CSS support, no PNG alpha-transparencies… the list is long, and the list is painful. Over the years as a developer I have learnt the hard way the tricks and hacks required to get Microsoft’s ageing browser to play nicely, to the point where (in the most part) IE6 bug-fixing is no longer as confusing and daunting as it once was.

But in 2009, with a wealth of better, alternative browsers available (not to mention Microsoft’s own IE7 and now the new IE8), an almost vigilante attitude has appeared, as a whole new anti-IE6 movement is steadily gaining steam.

These designers and developers are essentially saying “That’s it. Enough is enough“. To them, there is no excuse for this lame browser to have such prevail, and to continue to hold power such that it does, slowing and hindering web design and development. Their reasoning, of course, has several points that are hard to disagree with.

My own point of view on this isn’t quite so straight forward, though. Yes, it would be lovely if tomorrow everyone stopped using IE6, and the benefits for developers and clients would be seen almost instantly (you’d be surprised how much influence Microsoft products have on the limits of how certain aspects of a website have to be designed). But it’s nieve to assume people willingly choose this browser over others - they often don’t, or simply don’t have access to anything else.

As someone who believes passionately in accessibility and a positive online experience for all who use it, I feel it a priority to serve content to as many people as possible, and that means I will continue to optimise websites for IE6 as best as I can, for the foreseeable future, however frustrating that is. At the end of the day, the bottom line should not be the browser: but the user.

What the down-with-IE groups are doing that is positive is raising awareness. It’s already getting exposure, in magazines and other mainstream outlets. And that’s a really good thing. IE6’s days are numbered, that seems for certain, and that’s something I think we can all look forward to, as clients, designers, developers and forward-thinking web people.

What’s your browser of choice, and how did you come to choose it?

It is always a topic of conversation in any website meeting: ”where are we in Google?  We need to be top of the first page.  We need to be above our competitors!”  Companies are becoming obsessed with search engine optimisation and being top on the first page of Google.  And quite rightly so, with Google accounting for over 50% of Internet searches, it is a powerful marketing tool.

However, Microsoft is now bidding to overthrow Google’s search engine supremacy with the launch of Bing, a new search engine it says will give more useful results and end its rival’s dominance.

The search engine will allow users to target their searches more accurately and do away with the millions of irrelevant results that many searches retrieve on Google. Microsoft calls it a “decision engine” because, it claims, it refines your search more carefully and offers a list of topics of related interest — something Google doesn’t do.

Bing went live in the US on the 2nd June, and is currently under development at Microsoft’s headquarters in London.  Ashley Highfield from Microsoft says, We have what we think are a series of Google-beating features.” ”We are trying to move from a world where people are generally frustrated with their search, to one where people are genuinely pleased with their answers.

“For example, if you enter Nikon D80, Bing will know you are looking for a camera. From that moment on, a lot of things happen differently. With Google you get 500,000 search results in decreasing relevance. With us, because we know it’s a camera, we immediately open up categories on the left hand side. It starts with where to buy Nikon D80s, the next one is instruction manuals, or how to use Nikon D80s. Anything you put in it will recognise and start to categorise.”

Bing is an exciting new bit of kit, but it surely faces an up hill struggle to surpass Google.   But one day we could just be adopting the phrase ’Bing it’ in preference to ’Google it”