Benjamin Read

I wrote this post for the Indigo Tree blog. It’s aimed at a non-technical audience who want to get a grasp of the benefits of JAMStack, how it compares to LAMP and considers some of the implications such as changes to a users’ CMS.

I’ve recently moved tech stack entirely for deliciousreverie.co.uk, from reseller hosting using PHP to cloud hosting on AWS by Netlify, and using continuous deployment. This post details some of the hazards and benefits I encountered.

A Review of the past year and what I am aiming for in 2017.

There’s been a growing amount of talk about making websites more useable to people with disabilities in recent weeks. We at Indigo Tree have been increasingly aware of our role in providing access to the web to a wider range of people. Here’s how it’s already helping our clients increase their reach.

I built this site for the world-renowned pastry chef Dominique Ansel's London store whilst at Ech Design & Development.

Blog post written for Indigo Tree encouraging the use of style guides and atomic design.

I’m one of those guys (coming from a design background) that was terrified of the command line. Literally, terrified. I knew enough that simple commands could irreparably break my computer, and that scared me. But gradually, I’ve begun to use more command line tools, and recently discovered ways to make my workflow easier by using zsh terminal commands.

Ongoing Mentoring Diary: Jack

Since the summer I have been voluntarily mentoring Jack, a 16-year old who lives near Tenby in South Wales. We met whilst my family was on holiday. He was endeavouring to build a website for his fathers' business and expressed an interest in taking up web design / web development as a career.

We exchanged details and I gave him some tips that I believe would help him get started on a career in the industry.

Recently, he contacted me to ask a question about CSS ba... Read more

A post I wrote on the current state of the industry and how The Web Guild could prove very useful in the years ahead.

Wordcamp London 2016 was a great chance to make new friends and learn some excellent insights about running a successful agency, wordpress security and the necessity of backups, and some other stuff I’ve already started to use on a daily basis. You can read my roundup here:

I was approached by a leading supplier of audio music to the TV, radio and film industry to redesign a track result for their website. This was a great opportunity to provide an example of how I could improve their product’s search result listing and allowed me to delve more into something that challenged my UX and design skills more than usual.

Let Browsers Be Browsers — why I think the current trend for JavaScript frameworks is a step in the right direction ... but perhaps aren't the solution we need.

Why I think atomic design principles make sense — both from a design and development perspective.

Finished Backbone.js parts 1 & 2 on Code School https://www.codeschool.com/