Best Served Cold

Web design and development

We pride ourselves on producing high quality websites that fully conform to the highest web standards. Our sites are accessible and search engine friendly, making sure that all our sites have the best possible chance of succeeding where so many others fail.

Countdown – 48 hours are up

It all started yesterday morning at 10am: Could we build a web app in 48 hours over one weekend, just two developers and lots of caffeine.

Find out for yourself:

101 Best Websites

Review of the weekend

The idea for the site was to create a CSS / Design / AJAX showcase site with a rating system to start with, several different categories and topics to allow for plenty of updates. The twist to the site is that we’ll only show the top 101 sites in any category and the 101st site will get the same attention as the 1st.

We started with just a basic design, an idea of what we wanted to achieve and plenty of ideas. First job was to create a blog to write up our experience – WordPress of course! (101bestwebsites.com/blog/). Next we had to get the registration process seamless, keep it simple but secure. We decided early on that visitors to the site would need to register to submit new sites – our future plans would mean that it would become more important as time goes on.

Then came the submission process – this turned out to be a lot harder than expected, especially with all the little extras we had planned. The breakthrough came late last night on discovery of websnapr and the screenshot technology they provide.

This morning saw a lot of progress, submissions were successful, a few visitors (but no submissions) and we now have the categories set up and topics getting close to completion.

Our final big push this evening will be to get the ratings system in place so the site can do it’s initial job! It’s been a busy, sometimes frustrating but overall successful and satisfying weekend… Not sure I’d do it again soon though 🙂

Find out all details of the weekend and what we managed to complete

Build a Web App in 48 hours? Update!

Can you build an entire Web App in 48 hours?

We are going to try and find out!

Looking around at CSS showcase sites recently, we decided that there’s room for a more usable, functional website which takes into consideration the needs of the modern web designer/developer.

Our plan is to split out the categories into meaningful segments, such as AJAX websites, Design sites, etc, but with a difference, the top ranked website by our readers won’t be at the top of the page, the 101st website will be! This way, up and coming websites can get a look in and start building up their popularity.

The only two problems we have in developing this project are:

  • No money
  • No time

With that in mind, we’ve blanked out a weekend in our calendar: 10am-10pm Saturday the 12th July 2nd August 2008 and Sunday 13th July 3rd August 2008. One backend developer, one frontend developer working simultaneously on the project with targets set for every two hours, we’re going to see if we can build an entire web application in just two days!

We’re planning on using CodeIgniter as our frame work, on a LAMP system, possibly with WordPress to write a blog every two hours detailing our plans and progress.

Watch this space for more details and to see if we can do it!

*Edit: Due to a technical difficulty we didn’t actually get round to building the web app on the 12th/13th July… But we have replanned our diaries and this weekend is the weekend!