Blog posts by Alex Blandford

Being busy has almost become a way of life at dxw. Which is mostly in way of a mea culpa for not having blogged in the last few months. We’ve grown a huge amount in the past three months (we’ve more than doubled in size) and have been working hard on a few from-scratch projects as well […]

Websites, I like to think, are like cakes. They’re about cooking in proportions, they’re as many types as you have moods and I like eating cake (metaphor failing). Like a good sponge, digital products really only have a few key ingredients: Technology is actually the easiest bit of the puzzle (bearing in mind that this […]

It’s been a busy week in government digital, with the Sprint Alpha presentation at the start of the week catching everybody up to how far the GDS has got in building their new raft of transactional services. These services are the order of the day; they’re the priority for GDS and for us too: we’ve […]

We build most of our sites in WordPress, which has the advantage of allowing our clients to suggest plugins for specific functionality that they want on their site. Using plugins means we can grow the site quickly and without reinventing the wheel by coding for features that already exist. This is one of the great […]

It ain’t easy being an arts graduate in digital. In the increasingly distant past, I trained as a social anthropologist. Our first week as undergraduates was punctuated with talks about our future career possibilities: lots of mention of the fact that all sorts of companies like Microsoft and Intel employed anthropologists in their head offices […]

Writing for the web is one of those sorts of concepts that gets bandied around at seminars in Shoreditch and claustrophobic training courses. As a concept, it’s had a rough few years: it has been tarred with the SEO brush and for the longest time assumed that the most important reader was the search engine […]