We’re not hardcore deveolpers at Debut, wer’e designers, or to be more specific print designers but, as with any design business we need to be in touch with the digital side of design. We design websites and work with a team of developers who make them work for us although we do have some knowledge of HTML and CSS which is how we created our own site and integrated this WordPress blog.

Okay, on with the post.

A few months ago we launched CreativePanes, a blog to showcase design, illustration, animation and anything else creative that caught our attention, filled our twitter feed or made us smile.

As with this blog it is managed through WordPress from a template designed by WP Shower. We’ve modified it to suit our needs but in essence the coding has remained.

CreativePanes was ticking along nicely. We were adding content on a daily basis and while the visitors and followers were increasing steadily, we made updates and improvements to the site.

Some of the improvements included third-party plugins from WordPress, such as a WP firewall, All in One SEO and Digg Digg. The later was for adding social media icons to the footer of each post, to allow visitors to spread our posts through-out their social circle.

Generally WordPress plug-ins are free and integrate without any problems, although they can conflict with each, and sites can be overloaded with them but in this case the plugins worked perfectly. Visitors started using the social media buttons and the SEO plug helped our ranking in Google.

But, after a few weeks we noticed that CreativePanes became slow to load on any page. We had the site checked for malware and updated the firewall, in case we’d been hacked and changed all the passwords for users and the database as a precaution.

Still the site was slow to load, we noticed (when using Google Chrome or Firefox) that in the bottom left of the browser, our site was trying to access a website we’ve not heard of – b.scorecardresearch.com. Here’s a Google search for the term: b.scorcardreserach but from what we’ve found out they are a market research company that track website visitor’s habits. But what were they doing being re-directed from our site?

When our site opened it would hang for on average 4-6 seconds before loading – but in one instance it was as much as 23 seconds, which is an eternity when loading a website. Had it not been my own site, I wouldn’t have waited more than a few seconds for it to load. We knew that this would be the case for anyone else visiting but when we asked around, nobody complained of slow loading so the problem must have been on our machine.

All machines were checked for viruses, malware etc, both PCs and Mac but again nothing.

We visited sites that mentioned this b.scorecardresearch issue and found that it was a third-party cookie that although can be removed from your browser history, by deleting all cookies, it finds its way back on. Someone with more information on 3rd-party cookies may be able to explain in more detail how it hides and why it can’t be removed.

It became more and more frustrating and then when we visited our own blog we hit the same problem but loading was fine on the standard HTML pages of the site. So, finaly we were getting somewhere. WordPress became the common factor in the problem.

We cleared all our browser history and cookies on all the platforms we use, FireFox, Chrome, Safari, IE on both PC and Mac and checked again. Still the same problem. After trawling a few forums, we found that Google Chrome has a setting to block 3rd-party cookies so we ticked the box and checked the site again.

This time the site was quicker to load, although it was still too slow and the ‘blocked cookie’ icon appeared in the top-right. We clicked it and there was that pesky 3rd-party cookie, along with about 6 others for sites we knew nothing about but having Googled them, found them to have been causing the same type of problem for other users.

Using Chrome, we visited our own blog and tried a few friend’s sites who were running WordPress and the same type of thing happened -a handful of 3rd-party cookies being blocked.

We were confident that WordPress would be free of this kind of content but obviusly the themes could be downloaded and intigrated from thousands of different website but the 3 themes we were comparing, with the same issues, were different and it was for another bought of head-scartching that we spotted the common factor which was the Digg Digg plugin, so we deactivated it.

Instant success, and so we reactivated it to test and the cookies came back. We contacted anyone we knew who was using the plugin to make them aware and they also removed it.

We know very little about these 3rd-party cookies and if they are doing any harm but they regularly getting blocked by Chrome when we browse. In fact, more than half the sites we visit seem to have them.

Wikipedia on Cookies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

Does anyone have more details and insight into 3rd-party cookies?

CreativePanes is a website that showcases illustration, graphic design, photography, print, apparel, logo and website design. Each post is an insight or window into the work of the most talented creatives on the web.

We set this website up in February 2011, as a place to list all the inspiration material we found or were forwarded through social media.

Each post follows a simple formula, rather than being a list of work on a theme, they will highlight the work of only one creative. Following on from a brief introduction, the post will include text from the creative’s own website, usually a biography or statement and then examples of their work. This is followed by a direct link to their website or portfolio.

You can follow CreativePanes on twitter here, and like the site via facebook here.

Contributors
The majority of posts and articles are compiled by our team here at Début, but we also have contributer articles by Melissa Brunet, who is an independent graphic designer, committed supporter of design & the design community, and a willing conversationalist in all things design.

CreativePanes, daily creative inspiration: CreativePanes.com

Email us or editor@creativepanes.com if you have work, or have seen work you think we should mention.

We set this website up in 2006 to highlight the great work we felt was being produced in the local region by designers, photographers, artists and makers.

We kept the site regularly updated with news events and updates and promoted the good work being done by the Wolverhampton Creative Industries Forum, SP/ARK, Light House and the other creative and cultural organisation within the city such as Wolverhampton Art Gallery, the School of Art and Design and Wolverhampton Radio.

Unfortunately with no real resources to keep the site running, and limited time to give the site the attention it needed, late last year we put the site on hold.

It was a shame to see something that we’d but so much free time into, that we felt passionate about dwindle to nothing but we didn’t have resources to keep the site going.

Luckily a few weeks ago the Light House approached us to take the website on and so we’ve gladly passed the reigns to them. We hope that the new lease of life they site is receiving will help raise the profile of Wolverhampton’s creative sector.

You can keep up with Creative Wolverhampton news via the following links:

website: creativewolverhampton.co.uk
facebook: facebook.com/creativewolverhampton
twitter: twitter.com/creativewolves